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Rook . S 7 7 


PRESENTED liY 






















































WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 
MALCOLM SPENCER, m.a. 











WORK, PLAY, AND 
THE GOSPEL 


BY 

MALCOLM SPENCER, M.A. 

AUTHOR OF “ THE SOCIAL FUNCTION OF THE CHURCH," 

“ IMPASSE OR "'SPORTUNITY ? ” BTC. 



NEW Ylr YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 

r\°^ 


St? 


31 F'i 


PUBtlSHF# 

*MP 



WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL. V 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



CONTENTS 


CHAPTR* PXCB 

I. The Educational Approach . . . , . i 

I. The Need for a New Evangelism . . . . i 

II. The Alternatives ....... 3 

III. Educational Ideals ...... 6 

IV. The Present Opportunity . , , . .12 

II. Those who Pass the Gospel by . . . .16 

I. The Craze for Pleasure . . . . . .19 

II. The Revolt against Conventionality ... 30 

III. The Disavowal of the Church’s Leadership . . 34 

III. Yesterday, To-day, and For Ever .... 39 

I. The Fact of Christ . . . . . . .39 

II. The Fact of Deliverance ..... 43 

III. The Fact of Communion with God . . .51 

IV. The Fact of the Church. . . ... 55 

IV. The Christian Conception of Work . . .61 

I. The Standards of Good Work .... 63 

II. The Personal Relations Work brings ... 68 

III. The Crux of the Business . .... 74 

V. The Christian Conception of Leisure ... 80 

I. The Obvious Uses of Leisure . . . . .81 

II. The Higher Uses of Leisure • . ... 84 

III. Comradeship in Leisure . .... 90 

IV. Leisure and the Church . . , . ,94 

V. The Spiritual Potentialities of Drama . . .98 

v 






VI 


CONTENTS 


OHAPVEK PAGE 

VI. Beauty and the Life of the Spirit • • • 106 

I. The Eternal Significance of Beauty . » « • 109 

II. The Present Neglect of Beauty . . , ,116 

VII. Religious Decision and Religious Growth . .123 

I. The Rudiments of the Religious Spirit , . *123 

II. The Growth of the Religious Spirit # . .127 

III. The Fostering of Growth • • • « . 13a 

IV. Religious Decision • • • * . • 13S 


WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 




y 





WORK, PLAY, AND THE 

GOSPEL 

CHAPTER I 

THE EDUCATIONAL APPROACH 

I. The Need for a New Evangelism 

Those whose religious experiences are deep are 
prone to love old ways of presenting them to others, 
and sometimes these grow shallow as the currents 
of the world’s experience change and desert them. 
New ways are then needed, and provocation to 
seek them. So, to-day, new ways of approach to 
the problem of preaching the gospel are called for— 
and happily are being found. 

That this is so means neither any slight to the 
Gospel nor any compliment to the modern mind. 
The Gospel, in all essentials, is unchanging ; for it 
rests upon immutable facts concerning Jesus Christ 
His life and teaching, His death and resurrection ; 
and there lies its power of appeal. Age cannot 
wither its eternal message to the human spirit; 
though custom may a little stale the forms and 
metaphors in which it is set forth. When, then, we 
speak of our age needing a new evangelism it is 

I B 


2 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

not the Evangel but the “ ism ” which, we think, 
needs to be renewed—the method of approach to 
the hearer’s mind. A number of plain facts well 
known to those who are studying the way in which 
attention may be held, conviction formed, and 
character evolved, convince us that this is so. 

The primary need for some such new approach 
arises from the fact that a wrong conception of 
Christianity now fills the popular mind; and, 
therefore, whilst this is so, accustomed methods 
of presenting the Gospel must necessarily tend to 
re-awaken the wrong as well as the right features in 
the popular view. In a word, the Christianity of 
the Churches is associated in the mind of the 
ordinary person with a way of life which he frankly 
does not believe to embody all the best things which 
life has to offer, whilst the evangelist often appears 
to him in the rdle of one w T ho can only make the 
choice of it seem worth while, by offering him com¬ 
pensating interests in this world, and corresponding 
expectations in the world to come, of a kind he does 
not really understand or value. 

Now this is all very well for those who have 
come up against some outstanding personal problem 
of sin from which “ religion ” has offered them 
welcome deliverance : they then feel themselves so 
utterly glad to be rid of the past that they are 
prepared to sacrifice some of the good things which 
they valued formerly—as the just price of their 
new freedom. But for those who are not so 
harassed by a particular moral need, religious 
conversion is apt to be secured, if at all, at the cost 
of a dangerous suppression of their real self, and 


THE EDUCATIONAL APPROACH 3 

the result is evidenced in some cases by a wildly 
fanatical and quite unreasoning zeal, but more 
frequently by an only half-hearted attachment to 
the new way of life. 

Put very briefly, the difficulty is that Christianity 
is associated popularly with the acceptance of an 
unduly ascetic ideal of life, an unreasonable narrow¬ 
ing of life’s legitimate interests, an unthoughtful 
use of the Bible and other means of grace, and an 
unsportsmanlike anxiety about one’s own soul. 
Under these circumstances evangelism has to take 
its choice between two ways. It may either try 
to meet the situation by ignoring the existence of 
any real problem, proceeding then to reiterate its 
own beliefs, and taking care to create the most 
favourable occasions possible for their acceptance 
—as now in not a few well-advertised revivalist 
missions ; or it may try the slower method of the 
educational approach. 

II. The Alternatives 

The tendency of those who take the former 
course is to disparage the everyday life of the 
world, to regard enthusiasm for recreation, or art, 
or business, or thought, or social reform, as 
dangerous rivals to the claims of Christ, to hold to 
reactionary views of the Bible, to repeat the doctrinal 
shibboleths of the nineteenth century, to despair 
of seeing Christian influences penetrate the social 
life of the world, and to be content with this so 
long as individual “ souls ” are saved. However 
much good may be achieved along these lines it is 


4 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

impossible to expect that such evangelism can ever 
succeed in meeting more than the tiniest fraction 
of the needs of this generation. Violence is done 
to the instinctive and quite proper reserve of a 
personality when the citadel of the soul is captured 
by an assault on the emotions that does not at 
the same time satisfy the whole mind. Moreover, 
men and women are then rushed into positions 
which they cannot possibly continue to hold, since 
parts of their personalities remain unconvinced 
and unsatisfied. 

We cannot too clearly lay hold of the fact that 
“ conversion ” is only possible for the man who has 
in his mind two fairly well articulated systems of 
life which are mutually exclusive, one of which he is 
following and knows he should renounce, and the 
other of which he is neglecting and knows he should 
espouse, and these contrasted schemes of life are not 
present in most minds nowadays. Indeed, they are 
very far from being present, and their absence 
makes the appeal to decide between them fatuous. 
Till we have established in the hearer’s mind, as 
truth, the idea that Christianity stands for a fully 
satisfying life, we cannot wish him to be converted. 
The Christian scheme of thought and way of life 
need then to be presented as the practical way to 
the realisation of an all-inclusive ideal of life, and 
not merely as demanded on the authority of the 
Bible, or of the Church, or as meeting any need of 
salvation which has to be aroused by suggestion 
before it is felt in any real sense. 

There are, doubtless, many whose training has 
sufficiently persuaded them that to be a Christian 


THE EDUCATIONAL APPROACH 


5 


is the only really right and completely satisfying 

thing to be done, and their need is for something to 

rush them past and over their unworthy hesitations 

and delays. But this is not the typical case. The 

typical case is one in which the idea of Christ and 

Christianity is neither intellectually coherent nor 
✓ ✓ 

morally convincing. In the popular mind religion 
stands for the disavowal of things felt to be right 
and good, and the acceptance of a discipline felt 
to be both irksome and arbitrary. The practical 
obligations of Christian discipleship are vague and 
shadowy, and not truly representative of Christ. 
Hence the need for a clearer background of what 
Christian living means before the appeal for Chris¬ 
tian decision can be pressed. 

We are therefore bound to recognise the 
difficulties of the position, and to face them out ; 
and this is the educational way of approach to 
evangelism. Its primary difference from the alter¬ 
native method we have so briefly described is this : 
that it believes that the Gospel is indeed the Crown 
and fulfilment of the natural life and not its jealous 
rival. Through all the social life of man it sees the 
movement of the Spirit of God toward high and 
worthy forms of life. In the passion for gratifica¬ 
tion in play, or in the ambition for success in 
business, or in devotion to the claims of historic 
truth, or the call of some great cause in politics, 
it sees the human spirit struggling to realise its 
divine possibilities and needing only guidance and a 
true vision of life to bring it through to its spiritual 
goal. It does not seek to save the soul by diverting 
its attention from these human interests and aims, 


6 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

but by discovering their deeper meanings and higher 
possibilities, and by pointing out things in them all 
on which the stamp of God’s approval can be set. 
Its aim is a personality in which all the native 
energies which man possesses for enjoyment and 
achievement wax strong, and support and harmonise 
with one another, because all are made contributory 
to the wholly satisfying and all-inclusive purpose 
revealed for humanity in Jesus Christ. The tempta¬ 
tion of the educational method is to sow to the 
spirit more than it knows how to reap ; its strength 
lies in its fundamental faith that man, in all the 
variety of his social impulses, is indeed made in the 
image of God. With this belief we shall, throughout 
this book, try to connect the ideas for which 
education and evangelism respectively stand. 

III. Educational Ideals 

In turning, as we do turn in this book, to the 
science of education for light on the methods of 
evangelism, we do so, of course, with reservations. 
We are not giving ourselves over, bound hand and 
foot, to an empirical science. The work done by the 
teaching profession and by those who have studied 
the theory of teaching, sheds abundant light upon 
the processes by which minds grow and character 
is formed. It shows quite clearly the hollowness 
and instability of conversions reached by certain 
processes and of choices made under certain con¬ 
ditions. It knows a good deal of the genesis of the 
human mind and the laws of its elementary work¬ 
ings, and it provides implements of criticism by 


THE EDUCATIONAL APPROACH 7 

which to test the wisdom of this method and of 
that. The value of pwhat the educationists are 
teaching about method can hardly be overrated by 
those who understand the need to respect the unity 
of human personality. At the same time there are 
heights of personality which the educationist as 
such has not scaled and depths which he has not 
plumbed. Great is the mystery of the human soul, 
and among “ the masters of those that know ” we 
must turn sometimes for our clues to the evidence 
of the saints who had no educational theories to 
help or to check them, and to the experience of 
evangelists and revivalists of all degrees of educa¬ 
tional competence. For as those concerned in the 
Gospel, we want to help to fashion personalities 
that not only love goodness, truth, and beauty, but 
that attain through these things to a personal 
communion with a personal God. We want to see 
men and women converted to the God and Father 
of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

All this does not, however, take away one whit 
from the value of the discoveries made by those who 
have worked in the field of education, concerning 
the way in which the spiritual unfolding of human 
nature may best proceed. And we may feel fully 
justified in looking for guidance from this quarter, 
since we know that modern educationists, or at 
least an important section of them, accept a view 
of the ultimate aim and purpose of education which 
makes it essentially spiritual, and even evangelical. 
For it is the fact that, for many educators, the whole 
purpose of education is to awaken the personality 
of the pupil to the truth and beauty and goodness 


8 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

which God has impressed upon the world. Whether 
they are teaching history or geography or mathe¬ 
matics, they are trying to pass on their own sense 
of the wonder of life, its deep worth-whileness, the 
stores of joy to be found in entering into all its 
manifold revelations of God’s goodwill to man, its 
moving appeals to his better nature, and its calls 
for his response to the purposes of creation. 

The best teachers of to-day are not trying to 
turn little boys and girls into effective little ready- 
reckoners, each made on the same pattern, to say 
“ please ” and “ thank you ” and be industrious in 
making money and getting on. They are treating 
them as God’s children, born into God’s world to 
enjoy what is good and right in it, and to fill their 
beings so full of its goodness and rightness that they 
become themselves persons in the divine likeness, 
with the power of the divine spirit working in them 
and making them new sources of creative goodness 
according to their several abilities. The educator 
is thus seeking not only and not even primarily to 
pass on what he knows of life to those whom he 
teaches ; he is seeking primarily to help them, by 
looking at the world through his and their own 
eyes, to discover themselves and God. Some will 
say quite definitely that the only adequate aim of 
any education is a vision of God’s purpose for the 
world which will give unity and purpose to each 
individual life. Thus a recent great book on 
education,* which Prof. Michael Sadler hails as a 
permanent classic, makes the end of all education 
the establishment in the mind of the pupil of a 

# “Education and World Citizenship,” by J. Maxwell Garnett. 


THE EDUCATIONAL APPROACH 


9 

single all-embracing interest, the interest of estab¬ 
lishing the Kingdom of God upon earth. In that 
definition the educationist joins hands with the 
evangelist and implicitly commits himself to the 
need for the Gospel as the crown of his work. At 
the same time, he binds upon the evangelist the 
duty of showing how the principles of the Gospel 
can be made operative over the whole of life. He 
demands that the Christian’s experience of Christ 
should be shown to be no mere fragment or section 
of his total experience, but that the whole of his 
life, with all its business and social interests, should 
be an experience of living for and with Christ. 

Those educationists who take this view have 
seized upon an essentially Christian conception of 
personality and built upon it. In some ways such 
educationists are more evangelical than some 
evangelists—they have a bigger gospel; they 
promise a life more full of God in all its earthly- 
relationships, without waiting for death to release its 
larger spiritual possibilities. They view the child (and 
later the adult) as essentially a spiritual being, with 
a wonderful power of free response to ideal impulses 
and an instinct for expressing these in action in the 
material world. All the child’s faculties are capable 
of being brought into harmony with one another 
in the service of these ideals, if they are not foolishly 
repressed or perverted. The educator may not 
be prepared to dogmatise about the lengths to which 
the development of the individual may go. That 
is the evangelist’s business. But he is prepared 
to assure us that there is an almost universal 
appetite among children for the finer and higher 


IO WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

things in life, that all the child’s instincts and 
powers can be educated into harmony and made to 
serve a spiritual ideal, and that the unfolding in 
him of a fine moral and spiritual life is a strictly 
natural development. It is a tremendous fact to 
work upon and one from which the skilful educator 
gets full value. 

See, for instance, what the educationist makes of 
the child’s instinct for play. He recognises in it 
an activity into which the child has a natural 
aptitude for pouring all his energy and so building 
himself up. Get him at play, and you get him with 
all his senses alert and his being malleable. Then 
guide his play, and you can mould him as by no 
other means. You can teach him to play himself 
right through the gateways into the Kingdom of 
God. By play he may be taught skill and sympathy, 
unselfishness and co-operation. Even the spirit of 
worship may be fostered through play ; and all 
because the natural is a fit medium for the spiritual. 
Here, indeed, is one of the points where the evange¬ 
list has most to learn from the educator. “ Give 
me the child at play,” says the educator, “ I ask 
no better opportunity for educational influence.” 
“ Play,” says many an evangelist of to-day, “ is 
my great enemy ; the dances and the tennis-courts 
have driven me from my field, and now I am 
threatened with their rivalry even on Sunday: 
where will religion be found in the next decade ? ” 
We need to learn from the educator how to utilise 
for spiritual purposes the profusion of the modern 
passion for play. May not these pleasure-seekers 
in some instances also be drawn through play at 


THE EDUCATIONAL APPROACH n 


least to the portals of the Kingdom of God, just as 
is now the case with their younger brothers and 
sisters at school ? The issue may seem a trivial one, 
but it is not. It is fundamental. 

Behind this use of play by the modern educa¬ 
tionist lies a truly evangelical philosophy of life 
and personality. It is found not only in the 
educationist’s “ good news ” that the abundant 
energies of youth can be directed naturally into the 
furtherance of what is good, true, and desirable ; 
it is found also in the recognition that if these 
energies are to be so devoted with vigour and 
enthusiasm, the spirit must be led towards its goal 
by free and unhurried steps. You cannot drive 
or thwack personality into the acceptance of ideals ; 
you can only lead it thither at its own pace. You 
can give the opportunity for the things which are 
worthy of admiration to exert their own attraction. 
You cannot impose your own values on the minds of 
others. When education was regarded as a matter 
of transmitting to children the settled habits and 
ideas of their elders, it did seem as though the 
process could be consummated with whips and 
sharp injunctions ; authority always standing in the 
background ready to enforce its rules and standards 
with reiterations or punishments. But we know 
now that what you procure in that way is either a 
sullen spirit of revolt smouldering beneath an inert 
obedience, or at the best a sterile acceptance of the 
code imposed, lacking the energy and enthusiasm 
of an independent conviction. You cannot produce 
conviction by heavy insistence : you can only 
produce conviction by convincing, and that is a 


12 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

process which consists in producing evidence that 
what is alleged to be true is true when put to the 
test. All this will be seen to be relevant to the 
problem of evangelism when we come to consider 
the way in which the herald of the gospel hopes to 
win his hold upon the modern, not too favourably 
biased, mind. 

IV. The Present Opportunity 

The evangelism for which we argue is therefore 
closely allied with the more spiritual schools of 
educational principle which now most certainly hold 
the field. And thus it follows that the preacher 
can build his methods to-day upon the experience 
of the teacher, and in practice each can play into 
the hands of the other. This will be a tremendous 
gain to both education and religion if lull advantage 
be taken of it. For a long time, teacher and preacher 
have been at cross purposes, and education has not 
been seen by either as a partnership in a single 
spiritual process. But if the inherence of spiritual 
suggestions and ideals in all material facts and the 
evidence of spiritual evolution in all human history 
could now be recognised by teacher and preacher 
alike, the teacher could build up his scholars in a 
spiritual conception of the world which the preacher 
could afterwards confirm with his crowning message 
of the supreme personal relation declared possible 
in the Gospel between individuals and God. 

Preacher and teacher being thus seen to have a 
common purpose, the aim of education might grow 
clearer to both, and the methods of evangelism gain 


THE EDUCATIONAL APPROACH 13 

particularly in precision by the more exact results 
of educational study. Moreover, the gain to 
evangelism would not merely be in the realm of 
method. Educational thinking has, as we have 
seen, worked out a great conception of the royal 
freedom and divine capacity of each individual 
mind, wonderfully interpreting and emphasising 
the Christian conception of the value of the 
soul. Education has thus taken up a conception 
which it gained originally from Christianity and 
has articulated it so clearly that the content of 
the Gospel is permanently enriched. No one 
who desires to preach the Gospel to modern minds 
can afford to be negligent of the truth so clearly 
unfolded. 

Yet whilst we emphasise the spiritual unity of 
life, the spiritual tendencies of human nature, the 
urge of the Spirit of God toward the achievement 
of its ideals of goodness and loveliness by many 
means, and on every hand, we do not forget that 
the Power and Beauty of the Spirit of God are not 
manifested equally in every sphere of life. They 
are manifested supremely in Jesus Christ alone, and 
less perfectly, though still magnificently, in the lives 
which have most utterly yielded to the inflow of 
His divine life into themselves. So the educa¬ 
tional process falls short of its consummation 
unless it is completed by the evangelist who has 
nothing to tell the world save the story of Jesus 
and His disciples. 

Moreover, though the spiritual unfolding of 
personality may be indeed a strictly natural process, 
toward which the education of every human 


i 4 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

faculty may contribute, yet there is a downward 
pull toward death and stagnation to be reckoned 
with, and an evil will in man which resists the 
upward climb. There is a stiff fight for goodness to 
be fought out in every life, and no one has yet put 
forward any claimant for the power to overcome 
the lure of evil other than Jesus Christ. The 
power to save men from the strong things which 
tend toward corruption and to bind them to the 
exacting courses which make for life is His and His 
alone. He only can lift the degenerate from their 
lethargy and worldly-mindedness, and do away 
with our dull conventionality of soul. The Gospel 
is not written in the book of Nature, nor in the book 
of History, except as interpreted by Him. The 
vision of Jesus and the story of what He has meant 
to men are the supreme facts to which mem need 
to respondfor their salvation, and the right presenta¬ 
tion of them, which is the work of the evangelist, is 
therefore the supreme task of those who know the 
secret of life in Christ. 

From this the presentation of the Gospel might 
seem to be a matter requiring no particular educa¬ 
tional skill—as though Jesus were so supreme a 
figure that no art of presentation could either add 
to or diminish the direct power of His appeal. And 
yet we know that this is not so. For since we 
cannot easily, or without art, divest our statements 
of any facts from our habitual interpretation of 
them, so in preaching Christ we shall tend to 
emphasise those aspects of His work and personality 
which have most appealed to us, and perhaps to 
hide or obscure what would more readily appeal to 


THE EDUCATIONAL APPROACH 15 

others. Before, therefore, we attempt to state the 
essential message of the Gospel, we turn to consider 
the modern attitude to religion, and especially the 
attitude of those who are young,—if so be that we 
may find there our clue to the best method of its 
presentation. 


Footnote to Chapter I 

For the view of education taken in this chapter and applied to 
the problems of religious education, especially in my closing chapter, 
I am very largely indebted to T. Percy Nunn, Professor of Educa¬ 
tion in the University of London. I should like to refer particularly 
to his book in the Modern Educator’s Library (Edward Arnold, dr.) 
entitled, Education : its Data and First Principles, 


CHAPTER II 

THOSE WHO PASS THE GOSPEL BY 


How variously different speakers and writers 
estimate the religious condition of our time ! To 
some it is an age when morals are declining and the 
faith is being put in pawn by its own adherents in 
their eagerness to do homage to the modern mind. 
By others it is said that never was there a time 
when Christianity was so widely and truly under¬ 
stood, so seriously taken as it is by those who still 
profess and call themselves Christian. But in no 
quarter is there found any question of the general 
public revolt from the practice of public worship, 
and the practical severance of the ties which held 
many to the Church. It is quite symptomatic that 
our streets are thronged with pleasure-seekers at 
the time conventionally appointed for the united 
seeking of God in prayer. 

The single fact of widest bearing that underlies 
these diverse estimates is that this is an age of 
enfranchisement from the conventions of the past. 
If there are fewer professing Christians than there 
were, it is in the main because men are ceasing to 
make profession of religion merely conventionally. 
Whether in moral or spiritual matters, the sort of 
authority which held the majority, weakly com¬ 
pliant but not enthusiastically convinced, has lost 

x6 


THOSE WHO PASS BY 


*7 


its ascendancy. The world is growing up and 
asking questions ; it is refusing to be satisfied with 
the answers which satisfied it of old. Those who 
persevere with their questions come through to a 
faith which means more to them, in some ways, 
than the faith which was more traditionally and 
less questioningly acquired. But we cannot claim 
that the change is all clear gain. The faith that 
has been thus fought for is sometimes scarred and 
maimed. Christians who ask questions of their 
faith sometimes ask more than their experience can 
answer, and bear about them the marks of their 
dissatisfaction with their own solutions. There is 
less of that easy optimism and cocksureness which 
enabled the religious to carry the day with the 
unthinking, and which was the basis (by suggestion) 
of so much of the good and evil of the past. Leaving 
aside, however, the inner ring of more or less con¬ 
vinced believers in Christianity, to whom the change 
has brought much benefit, we have to consider the 
needs of the crowd which has for the moment 
slipped away from the direct influence of expressed 
religion. It is with this pressing problem that 
evangelism has particularly to deal. 

Before, however, we enter upon our detailed 
analysis of the problem let us be sure that the 
present phenomena cannot mean any sudden 
fundamental collapse in the spiritual susceptibility 
of those with whom we have to do. Fundamentally 
they are much the same as their forefathers. They 
have the same emotions, the same physical and 
psychic needs, the same susceptibility to experience, 
the same affinities with good and evil. The 


18 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

educational sciences forbid us to believe in any such 
sudden slump in human nature as the scaremongers 
in the religious world would have us affirm. Funda¬ 
mentally these men* and women who on Sunday 
shut themselves in their suburban gardens, are the 
same as their fathers who never failed to go to 
Church. These boys and girls who swarm along 
the city streets are not less religiously inclined than 
their predecessors. Their religious development is 
arrested, and they will suffer for it ; but there is 
nothing portentous or overwhelming in the present 
phase of things. By those who have faith and 
patience, there is a solution to be found, and the 
clues to its discovery are known to those who are 
experienced in observing the ways of the human 
mind. 

But whether this be admitted or no, it is plainly 
futile to rail at the iniquity of a generation and 
bemoan its evil tendencies. It is as absurd to 
indict a whole generation as it is to indict a whole 
nation. What is found common to them all is, 
for each single one of them, virtually inevitable, 
in view of the strong hold of public opinion over 
unawakened minds ; each average individual is the 
child of an environment whose moulding tendencies 
all but overwhelm the puny forces which are at his 
call. When the religious response of multitudes is 
as deficient as it is to-day, it must be due to some 
radical blemish in the religious influences of the 
times. We can only meet the situation by ceasing 
to rail at it and learning to diagnose it. Diagnosis 
will reveal both the nature of the trouble and the 
point at which it must be attacked ; it may also 


THOSE WHO PASS BY 


*9 

afford at least some clue to the proper remedy. 
We are not for a moment inclined to discharge any 
class of individuals from their own particular share 
of responsibility for the use they are making of 
the light and leading God has given them ; but if 
we would lay that responsibility as heavily upon 
them as it should be laid, we are bound to recognise, 
first of all, how tightly they are gripped by the 
thought forces in their social environment. We 
shall have to discriminate presently between what 
is good and what is evil in these modern fashions 
of thought. 

What, then, are the characteristics of the 
religious indifference of the hour ? What, especially, 
is the religious outlook of those who are young 
enough to be the representatives of the post-war 
period ? What in the mental make-up of the young 
people of the present day are the fundamental 
factors which we must take for granted as the 
undeniable data for our problem—to be met, 
not with reproach but with understanding and 
sympathy ? Analysis carried far enough will reveal 
to us in every case that they are the intelligible 
perversions of natural tendencies which might be 
diverted or converted to good ends if only they were 
understood. But first, what are they ? Three in 
particular claim attention. 

I. The Craze for Pleasure 

Let us begin with the most obvious and im¬ 
mediately disconcerting factor of all, the modern 
passion for pleasure—a passion which modern 


20 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

business enterprise so successfully exploits. Not 
of this generation will any prophet say, “ I have 
piped unto you, and ye have not danced.” The 
world is drinking in amusement like a thirsty horse 
with its head in the river. But who can wonder, 
whilst we are not yet ten years beyond the gloomy 
terrors of universal war which robbed the young 
manhood of the nation of its most irresponsible 
years ? Who can wonder when the girlhood of the 
nation has just passed through a total subversion 
of its old standards of living ; when the old-time 
notion of a stay-at-home life as the girl’s inevitable 
portion has been swept completely away; when 
girls have been everywhere and done everything, 
and raised money enough to live in unaccustomed 
luxury; who can wonder when the whole world of 
young people has awakened up with a start to the idea 
that it has been kept in pupilage too late and too long? 

Youth has been discovering the thrill of physical 
health and vigour, the joy of bodily grace and 
movement : how natural, then, its repudiation of 
the stuffy ways of a generation which so wrapped 
its body up that it was always liable physically to 
cold and anaemia, and morally to prudery and 
acidity of mind! How rightly, too, is it in revolt 
against a civilisation which has let millions live in 
the dark and murk and dirt of city slums, which 
has maimed and stunted millions more in occupa¬ 
tions beyond the normal endurance of the human 
frame, and which has made aesthetic and intellectual 
satisfaction the prerogative of the few! How 
natural if, instead, it is now claiming its fill of light 
and air and fun and fitness! 


THOSE WHO PASS BY 


21 


Dr. Rufus Jones has said recently that we are 
confronted by a generation of boys and girls who 
seem to be unconcerned whether God exists or not. 
They are not lawless ; they merely appear to have 
no interest in religion. They have eliminated that 
dimension of the soul which opens out into fellow¬ 
ship with a great, invisible Companion. The 
greater number of young people, says another wit¬ 
ness, so fill their lives with pleasure and work, and 
live at such a speed that they have no time for quiet 
and reflection. It is not that they are essentially 
more frivolous than the young men and women, for 
example, of a hundred years ago. On the whole 
they compare favourably with the young ladies and 
gentlemen of the pages of Jane Austen. But the 
Christian life seems to them dull, uneventful, and 
inartistic, and without appeal to their abundant 
activity. No place can be found in it for the self- 
expression shown, for example, in their love of 
games. The Christian ideal of life inculcates self- 
restraint, self-denial, and effacement; they feel that 
it would force them into an atmosphere which would 
stifle them. Many forms of heroism make an appeal 
to them, but not this form. Partly because they 
are generous-minded the offer of individual salvation 
makes no appeal to them ; nor are they afflicted with 
a sense of sin which might make the offer more 
acceptable. They are not indecisive, nor yet 
indifferent ; their strong devotion to pleasure and 
sport proves this. They are capable of great 
enthusiasm. But their sense of values is wrong. 
Some day they may learn the paradox that “ He 
that loseth his life shall find it.” But at present 


22 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

the call they hear is a call to take hold of the things 
life offers them, to enjoy them, and prove their 
worth, and so they follow their natural instincts and 
desires to excess. The tide race of their physical 
nature is now running fast and will not be turned 
back by any pious indignation or highly spiced 
variety of religious emotional appeal. A hunger for 
the sweetness and the colour of life has been created, 
first by years of starvation, and then by a riot of 
opportunity for sense satisfaction. It may well be 
a matter of sheer biological advisability that the 
hunger should be satisfied. As the British Medical 
Association has been saying, a certain amount of 
conviviality is necessary at all times for the mainte¬ 
nance of our mental stability, and what is true 
generally must be specially true to-day. Certainly 
it is for the educator to accept the fact of this 
hunger and to offer ways of satisfaction that are 
spiritually educative. 

The last remark implies that there is in this 
hunger for pleasure some hunger of the spirit, which 
can be discriminated from the lower hunger of flesh 
and sense, and fed with spiritual bread. And surely 
there is. There is a hunger of the spirit for gaiety 
and a refusal of the bread and water of affliction 
that must be dear to the heart of Jesus when He 
said, “ Take no anxious thought for the morrow, 
for the morrow will take thought for itself : sufficient 
unto the day is the evil thereof.” This generation 
has been taught that its total energies must be 
absorbed in eating and fighting, and producing the 
means to eat and fight. It may be that, mixed up 
with the pleasure hunger of the day, there is a 


THOSE WHO PASS BY 


23 

spiritual revolt against the dark modern philosophy 
of a commercial age which has left too little room for 
the cultivation of joy. Duty first, pleasure after¬ 
wards, is an unimpeachable doctrine to many of 
our moral guides, but it is doubtful if it is not a 
damnable heresy from the Christian standpoint. 
It implies that there is no pleasure in duty and no 
duty in pleasure, and the divorce between the two 
is a wicked indictment of the bounty of God’s 
provision for the world. 

There are many who say plainly that as it works 
out, it means that they may break their backs and 
starve their souls to produce wealth and ever more 
wealth for the wealthy » and to many of those 
who are not poor themselves, it means that they 
must live in harness till they are blind to all values 
but the values of getting on. This country, without 
any shadow of doubt, has sacrificed its sense of 
light and shade, of charm and beauty, of melody 
and gaiety, to the gods of steel and iron, and to the 
virtue of getting on. And we are poor in imagina¬ 
tion, poor in artistic capacity, poor in abstract 
thought because of this. We have cultivated a 
dull insensibility to the appeals of the ideal world. 
The only time we have allowed to many to dream 
and frolic has been when they were already physi¬ 
cally and emotionally exhausted with tending 
machines. It is to be remembered that we are not 
three generations away from the good folk who sent 
children into mines and factories before they were 
ten. And now reaction has set in—rather terribly 
—but thank God we are not any more going to 
spend all our lives padding our chairs, filling our 


24 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

bellies, and inventing machinery for making every¬ 
thing plentiful and cheap. 

Let it be clear, however, that this is not 
an unqualified plea for the present undisciplined 
demand for amusement. It is only a plea that we 
recognise as an dement in the modern temper and 
revolt a vague sense of the worth of certain things 
which are indeed worthy, and whose worth both 
public opinion and evangelical teaching have failed 
to recognise. And the element in it that is good 
must be not only admitted, but made the starting 
point for a process of spiritual education. In the 
love of dance and drama, and the interest in pretty 
clothes and gay companionship, the starved aesthetic 
sense is finding its first crude expression. And the 
aesthetic value in life, as Clutton-Brock is insisting, 
is a fundamental thing, an absolute value, a spiritual 
ultimate. To deny or to ignore it is to foreclose 
the possibility of an all-round spiritual development 
for many, and to discredit one’s own spiritual 
authority into the bargain. Those who have 
savoured the fundamental good in art and music 
(even maybe in the crude arts of jazz dancing and 
dressing for the part) are right in their instinctive 
feeling that those who belittle these things have a 
perverted sense of what is really good. Their 
spiritual education must come partly through the 
education of their aesthetic sense. Starved and 
unsatisfied, the aesthetic hunger will continually 
thwart the development of the spirit ; recognised 
and guided it may be an avenue to a well-propor¬ 
tioned spiritual development. 

Grant but the worthiness of even a part of this 


THOSE WHO PASS BY 


25 

desire for joy and beauty, and though we may 
regret the extent to which it cuts out other and 
ampler ideals, we can acquit the youth of to-day 
of any unforgivable sin. We can deal with the 
matter once we understand and sympathise. If 
we reflect how abruptly youth has awakened to the 
extraordinary capacity of mankind for finding 
enjoyment and the extraordinary fruitfulness of the 
world in yielding means to satisfy that taste for 
joy, we shall not wonder if it is doing so heedlessly, 
breathlessly, without taking time for serious re¬ 
flection. But does this indicate a fundamentally 
selfish and materialistic outlook, a set opposition 
to altruism or religion, an antipathy to the true 
love of God or man ? Surely this is not the case. 
Youth has indeed found a new dimension in its 
capacity for enjoyment; but youth has not com¬ 
mitted itself to taking its enjoyment selfishly, or 
continuing to take it superficially. If, then, we 
are to win the enthusiasm of youth we must not 
frown upon this present mood, but build upon it, 
interpreting it, and showing how it may be fitted 
in as a true part of a bigger whole. In the main, 
I believe that the typical young folk inside the 
Church share this sense of the goodness of the 
material life with those outside it, and that they 
are unable to regard it as fundamentally at enmity 
with the best and highest life. The majority are 
so persuaded of this that they are only capable of 
being won to the highest by a hearty recognition 
of the goodness, in its own order, of the life to which 
they are already drawn. 

May we not also set with this pleasure-loving 


26 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

characteristic of modern youth the fact that it 
is strongly moved by the sufferings of those who 
are shut out of their natural inheritance of joy ? 
It is strongly sympathetic with any who are 
treated with tyranny or cruelty. It is given to 
indignation against wrong. It is often secretly 
oppressed with the kink in the nature of things 
which seems to establish so much oppression and 
hardship in the structure of social life. Often it is 
less indifferent than paralysed by the spectacle of 
evil against which so little seems to be able to be 
done. What power on earth, it thinks, can stand 
up to the tragedy of Russian famine and Irish 
anarchy, and the present tragically low standard 
of earnings of the South Wales miners ? It is not 
proved yet that the typical representatives of youth 
to-day would not be ready to forego much of their 
pleasure if they could thereby ensure a more decent 
distribution of the good things of life which they 
have themselves learned to appreciate. But they 
are not getting a lead to do so. They are not 
getting the motive of religion harnessed to their 
instinctive sympathy. 

The practical ideal of unselfishness that should be 
commended to folk with such an outlook is the ideal 
of placing a physically good life within the reach 
of all. Its first principle, morally and spiritually, 
must be sharing, and sharing not of spiritual goods 
in abstraction from material goods, but of material 
goods with all the spiritual values that inhere in 
them when they are shared. The moral passion 
we ought to aim at arousing in the typical repre¬ 
sentative of this generation is a passion for realising 


THOSE WHO PASS BY 


27 

the social brotherhood of man, not as a mere 
sentiment, but as an actual sharing of the world’s 
material goods and of the control of its material 
processes. The Spirit of God is striving with this 
generation to find an economic expression of brother¬ 
hood, with political arrangements making that 
economic brotherhood secure,* and, therefore, the 
only religious movement for the day is one that is 
closely intertwined with the attempt to realise this 
ideal. If then we find a high value attached by 
this generation to material things, we should not 
spend our time lamenting it; but should be quick 
to turn it to advantage for the realisation of some 
great new expression of the ideal of brotherhood, 
some great new effort to establish the Kingdom of 
God upon earth. 

This generation is indeed unlikely to accept 
a religion which takes a negative attitude towards 
the material and the physical, and centres its 
morality in the endeavour to keep the spirit of the 
individual disentangled from the interests of the 
flesh. It needs a religion which will enable men to 
possess the world and use it to the full, not selfishly, 
but with all-round good-will. It cannot take 
seriously the ascetic ideal of those who seem more 
bent on teaching people to be restrained and 
thoughtful than on helping them to make each 
other happy. If it is to be persuaded to devote 
itself to the service of others, it must be allowed to 
serve them first by making the world a pleasant 
place for all. It is only a minority of mankind whose 
altruism can or should express itself chiefly in the 
care of other people’s minds and morals. Of course, 


28 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

up to a point, we are all our brother’s keepers both 
morally and spiritually. But the proportion of 
life is lost if we are all of us asked to exercise our¬ 
selves primarily for each other’s mental develop¬ 
ment and good behaviour. That is the teacher’s 
and the parson’s speciality, and an honourable one. 
But we shouid hardly expect that people whose 
lives are spent for the most part in making or 
distributing material things should develop par¬ 
ticularly along those lines. For the majority, 
surely, their altruism ought to express itself mainly, 
at first, in the sharing of material happiness of a 
well-chosen kind. 

It might seem as if we were recommending a 
course of life which involves no moral discipline 
and no spiritual development, but is this so ? 
Enlist the young of the world, first of all, in the 
enterprise of sharing the good things of the world, 
and much more will follow. The appeal to make 
service their serious aim in life, being one that they 
can understand, is one to which they will respond, 
and service will presently call for its own discipline 
to make it efficient and successful. Then, too, if 
the business of enjoyment be taken seriously it 
proves to be a rudimentary art which can be so 
cultivated that it discloses spiritual values, and 
demands a discipline of its own. Moral and 
spiritual choices are called for, and moral and 
spiritual growth is engendered if recreation is 
recognised as an important segment of the whole 
circle of life, in which there are ideals to be upheld. 

If young people can be thus enlisted for ideals 
which they can understand, and in which ultimate 


THOSE WHO PASS BY 


29 

values are at stake, they will be prepared to face 
odds and difficulties when these occur. The diffi¬ 
culties will show themselves in a thousand forms, 
from the difficulty of teaching uncivilised hooligans 
to play the game in sport to the difficulty of teach¬ 
ing profiteering magnates and domineering foremen 
to play the game in industry. And when these 
difficulties bar the way to ideals which they have 
made their own, they will be ready to accept the 
discipline that is necessary in order to overcome 
them. They will discover that the conflicts which 
are involved in carrying their ideal through are 
spiritual, and will then be in a position to learn 
from Jesus, and from the Cross, the terms on which 
alone the battle with evil can be successfully won. 
But they will not be launched on this voyage of 
spiritual discovery at all if they are first required 
to discount their sense of life’s values, because 
religious people say they should. So, then, the 
challenge of Christ to youth should be presented, 
not first of all in terms of the inner discipline and 
sacrifice that it may in the end involve, but first 
of all as a call to unselfish service and enjoyment. 
In the name of Christ, let us give youth a charge 
to take up that task, and a promise of His help in 
their endeavour. Once they embark upon it, we 
shall find that all the energies they derive from their 
natural self-expression in the form of play will be 
available for the cause of the Kingdom of Christ; 
and in place of undue self-expression and egotism, 
there will be that consecration of human instincts 
which, it has been said, is the very essence of 
Christianity. 


30 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 


II. The Revolt against Conventionality 

A second mark of the modern revolt against 
religion can be more briefly dealt with, for it is more 
generally understood ; viz., the revolt against con¬ 
ventional morality. Undoubtedly, the modern mind 
is now in open revolt against taboos of every 
kind. If a moral precept is right, it will be able to 
justify itself. So runs the argument; and it avails 
little to point out that it may need mature ex¬ 
perience to appreciate the value of certain precepts 
and appeals. Youth will not ever listen to its 
mentors very readily, and still less in a day like ours, 
when the accepted moral wisdom of the world has 
been so seriously called in question by the failure 
of civilisation to eliminate industrial and inter¬ 
national strife. Youth may not estimate the 
wisdom of its elders as highly as it would if it knew 
more of the burden and complexity of affairs. But 
that is not to be expected. The point of which 
youth is quite sure at present is that age is very 
fallible and the morality of the elders far from a 
complete success. Having been tumbled first into 
a world of war, and next into a world of social 
disorganisation, youth is inclined to wonder if all 
the morality of its monitors is not fumbling and 
merely traditional. It is not contended that this 
is an explicit line of argument ; the main currents 
of the arguments which sway the judgments of a 
generation run underground, but this is the fair 
logic of events. So when morality says of any 
practice nothing more than “ don’t,” youth says, 


THOSE WHO PASS BY 


3 1 


“ Be hanged to you, why shouldn’t I ? ” And the 
moralists of this generation have, as we know, been 
caught in this way without a reasoned answer to 
the revolt against some of the most sacred of our 
moral maxims. Not even in such fundamental 
matters as the sanctity of marriage and the limits 
of sex intercourse will the more venturesome take 
rulings without reasons, and not even in these 
fundamental matters is the wisdom of the elders 
dear and convincing and direct. 

Instinctively, youth to-day judges morality by 
its broad social outcome, and asks of the traditional 
morality whether or not it ministers to human good. 
On that showing, the majority of those who are 
morally alert give judgment against the morality 
which underlies the organisation of modern 
industrial and international society. The intel¬ 
lectual leaders of the youth of the world of all 
classes do not believe that the current organisation 
of business or of nations is consistent either with 
Christianity or with common sense. The estab¬ 
lished morality seems to them to be grounded on an 
outworn tradition. It is not a morality dictated 
by considerations of universal kindness. It seems 
rather to be dictated by considerations of self- 
preservation—moral self-preservation doubtless, but 
still self-preservation. It is of the “ touch not, 
taste not, handle not ” order, the aim of it being to 
save one’s own skin. For youthful idealists it is 
too selfish, too cautious, too prone to refuse the 
joys of the moment for the sake of more dubious 
joys to come. We may argue that the vast majority 
of the youth of all classes are not youthful idealists, 


32 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

and will not, therefore, hold or be influenced by these 
views, so that the adverse verdict of a minority 
does not signify. But it does : for these are the 
natural leaders of their contemporaries, and their 
moral judgment is of far more moment than the 
moral judgment of the elders. 

Once again, it is not pretended that the instinc¬ 
tive moral standards of youth are more satisfactory 
than the traditional moral standards of age. They 
are, on the contrary, dangerously short-sighted, 
dangerously doctrinaire, and dangerously partisan. 
Even the ideals of those who are morally serious are 
apt to make class interests their horizon. In many 
quarters we have to face the perverse opposition 
of minds which have been thoroughly embittered 
by the past. But whilst these complicate the 
problem, they do not constitute its main feature. 
The common attitude is one of quite dispassionate 
aloofness, and frank but good-natured disregard of 
all that religion has to say, due to our failure to think 
out and proclaim a system of Christian conduct 
which will do justice to all the legitimate appetites 
of human nature and cover all the major needs of 
social life. This generation has not been convinced 
by Christianity because it has come to them 
'practically associated with a morality of taboos, 
timidity, and fear; theoretically associated with a 
morality of love which they have not seen courage¬ 
ously applied to public life, and which, indeed, their 
elders (whether they be pious or pagan) tell them 
will not work. If this is an exaggeration, it is an 
exaggeration which contains a profound truth. 
Christianity seems to the more thoughtful to be 


THOSE WHO PASS BY 


33 


associated in practice with a morality which is 
discredited, and in theory with a morality which 
Christians do not consistently avow. For the less 
thoughtful it is associated with a morality which 
limits itself to a few phases of life and is blind to 
many of the values of life which seem to them real 
and of good report. The preaching of the Gospel 
to the multitude, therefore, demands a far more 
explicit conception of the Christian life and how it 
is to be lived, happily and effectively, amid the 
ordinary demands of social and industrial life. 

Multitudes of Christian teachers and preachers 
there doubtless are, whose teaching and preaching 
is free from the blemishes which give rise to these 
misunderstandings of Christianity. It is they who 
are carrying on the bulk of the real and effective 
evangelistic work of the present day. But they are 
apt to class themselves, and to be classed, as 
educators rather than evangelists, and to leave the 
work of evangelism to others. They do not bring 
this message to the street corners. Indeed, it is 
generally true that those who have the broader 
Christian conception of life are leaving the more 
aggressive work of evangelism to others. There is 
much in the nature of the modern approach to 
account for this, but it is not satisfactory. It calls 
for redress. The modern message needs a sharper 
evangelistic edge. And one of the essentials for 
this is the articulation of a much more clear-cut 
conception of the principles on which Christian 
people ought to conduct themselves, both with 
regard to their work and with regard to their 
leisure. To be a Christian a man must be 

D 


34 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

converted to Christ’s standard of values explicitly in 
relation to each of the great spheres of his interest 
and action. Conversion implies the exchange of 
one moral conception of life for another. Con¬ 
viction of sin, repentance, consecration—all these, 
to be really effective, need to be not vague and 
general in their content, but quite specific. They 
call for a more decisively Christian conception of life. 

III. The Disavowal of the Church’s 

Leadership 

We come now to the third mark of the modern 
revolt against religion—the disavowal of the 
Church’s spiritual authority. The Christian con¬ 
ception of life is of course much more than a moral 
conception, though moral factors enter into it. It 
must be a spiritual conception. We cannot be 
content merely with right standards of conduct. 
Work and play and family life have their material 
sides and their earthly values, but they have also 
their spiritual side and their eternal values. We 
need to bring these out, teaching men to work and 
play together, and to love one another in ways that 
recognise that this world is only an episode in the 
life of our spirits, that we are each and all denizens 
of eternity, with immortal spirits made for spiritual 
communion with one another and with the Father 
from Whom came our being. But we must face 
the fact that the testimony to the eternal values 
of the unseen world, as it is given by the Church 
to-day, is already partly discredited by the Church’s 
failure to appreciate truly the values of the things 
of time and sense. How shall we expect from the 


THOSE WHO PASS BY 


35 

multitude a ready credence for our teaching of the 
joys of communion with God, and the assurance of 
immortality when we have proved faltering and 
unreliable guides in matters more within their 
present knowledge and discretion ? 

Were but the youth of to-day approached along 
the lines suggested, I believe that in the main they 
would respond eagerly to the deeper message of 
the Church. For there is behind their superficial 
absorption in activity and amusement a hunger for 
a more satisfying conception of life. They are 
driven to find sensuous satisfaction in pleasure, in 
part because they can find so little spiritual satis¬ 
faction in work. It is in the recoil from forms of 
activity which have no moral attraction and no 
spiritual purpose that they plunge into forms of 
recreation which have so little of either spiritual or 
moral worth. But they are not deeply satisfied 
with their choice. They cannot rescind it because 
it is based in deep instincts which they cannot 
ignore ; and they cannot, therefore, turn sincerely to 
a religious ideal which takes no real account of these. 
At the same time they hunger for something more. 
They want their passion to make life good inter¬ 
preted to them in spiritual terms. They want to 
learn the spiritual conditions by which alone they 
can make good for themselves, and in their relations 
with each other, boy with girl, and friend with 
friend. Along these lines they are more than 
ready to enter Christ’s Kingdom ; but they must 
be taken where they stand and shown how the good 
they already know leads on to the larger deeper 
good for which as yet they only grope and hunger. 


36 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

We have to consider how much there is in the 
Christian message which is strange and terrifying. 
We owe it to youth to make our account of 
it credible by first making cogent and satisfying 
that part of it which is nearest the edge of their 
comprehension. 

We must also remember that the modern person 
is the product of a century of tremendous absorp¬ 
tion in practical achievement, during which a 
scientific view of the world has come to be character¬ 
istic of every normal citizen. He is quite sure of 
the reality of the world of matter, and not nearly 
so sure of the reality of the world of spirit. The 
precision of man’s knowledge in the sphere of 
material things, as against the fluctuation of opinion 
in the sphere of spiritual knowledge, has given a 
sense of truth to the one and a suspicion of super¬ 
stition or mere sentiment to the other. Then, 
again, though few know much about such questions 
as Biblical criticism, what little is known of the 
Church’s timidity towards them heightens the sense 
of dubiety which attaches to religious propositions 
not verifiable by experience. And with the general 
discredit of the authority of the Church, authority 
and the power of influence have passed to those 
whose reputation is strong in the practical conduct 
of life, and so the man in the street takes his cue 
from the “ good fellow ” rather than from the good 
Churchman. His philosophy of life is one in which 
abstract religious statements and the common 
metaphors of religious speech mean simply nothing. 
To the modern mind no general statements un¬ 
supported by illustration carry much meaning, 


THOSE WHO PASS BY 


37 

whether they are on religious or other subjects. 
When, then, we come to present the Gospel to such 
minds we need to be careful to divest it of its 
dependence upon systems and forms of thought 
which are unfamiliar to modern minds, and which 
the Church has no longer sufficient authority to 
impose as thought forms for their religious life. 
It is desperately important that a man should 
receive his highest thought in the terms and cate¬ 
gories which he understands. This point will be 
of great importance when we come, as we do in 
the next chapter, to outline the essential message 
of the Gospel. 

For, I would remind the reader that what 
we have been considering so far is not the full 
message of the Gospel, but only some of the 
problems of relating the Gospel to the stock of 
ideas which is present in the minds of those we wish 
to win. Our Gospel offers to men a very much 
fuller, deeper, and richer scheme of life than that 
which is held by those who now so easily pass it by. 
But if the presentation of it is to convince them, 
it must first be just to their present state of mind. 
It must acknowledge the good in all those good 
things which their more restricted standards claim 
to be good. It must not try to cry up the value of 
the life eternal by depreciating the value of things 
temporal. It must not decry art and beauty, nor 
exalt self-purification above social service. It 
must not call men to a scheme of conduct which is 
essentially ascetic and self-regarding. All these 
matters, however, important as they are, lie rather 
on the circumference than at the centre of the 


38 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

Gospel. The Gospel is essentially a testimony to 
certain facts of history and truths of experience 
the recognition of which has a transforming effect 
upon human life. These elements of historic fact 
and eternal truth in the Gospel to which we have to 
testify, we cannot alter or adapt to fit the changing 
needs of the passing generations. We can only 
describe them as matters of experience and leave 
them to make their own impression. We shall have 
done all we can to secure them a hearing if we have 
tried, before describing them, to look at life through 
the eyes of those to whom our witness is to be given. 
What this eternal and changeless element in the 
Gospel is, we shall now try to see, and to state in 
terms which the modern mind can understand. 


CHAPTER III 

YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOR EVER 

In this chapter we shall try to present the basal 
elements of the Gospel; separating them as far 
as we can from the metaphor and philosophy of 
particular ages and periods in the Church’s history. 
Doing so, we find the Gospel to consist in these four 
sets of facts : the fact of Christ, the fact of de¬ 
liverance from sin, the fact of communion with 
God, and the fact of the Church. The classification 
is not rigidly logical and watertight; but it may 
serve for purposes of exposition without leading to 
practical confusion. 


I. The Fact of Christ 

The power of the Gospel lies to-day, as always, 
in the attractive power of Jesus Christ. It is He, 
and not our theories about Him, that saves men. 
We are always saying it, but cannot too vividly 
realise what we say. Particularly important to-day 
is this realisation of the supremacy of the Life as 
seen in the Gospel portrait over the subsequent 
systems of thought in which men have interpreted 
what Christ meant to them and to the world; for 

39 


40 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

to-day the theological interpretation of Christ is 
peculiarly unconvincing to the average mind. The 
average person has extraordinarily little capacity 
for abstract thought of any kind. He has still 
less capacity for assimilating thought expressed 
in the terms of an unfamiliar race or of a bygone 
age : and such is very much of the Church’s theology 
of redemption. The Christian doctrine of redemp¬ 
tion is commonly set out in metaphors which are 
difficult except to those who are interested in the 
history of thought. Thus, for example, the explana¬ 
tion of redemption in terms of guilt makes use of 
legal metaphors which are not easily understood by 
a nation steeped for centuries in the thought of the 
Fatherhood of God. And the explanation in terms 
of sacrifice requires some knowledge of the history 
of the place of sacrifice in primitive religions to 
make it cogent. Those who are devoted Christians 
may be glad to wrestle with the difficulties of 
theology : yet it is not theology but Christ as a 
living figure who draws men to Himself. Man is 
so constituted that he can best see what it is worth 
while to do and to be when the ideal is presented to 
him in a life. Compared with such a presentation, 
theology is impotent. And so we have to-day, as 
ever, to show forth Jesus Christ, the Man of men, 
the Man of God, as the one supreme figure with 
whom all men have to reckon. 

Some of us would like to preach Christ to men 
with a clear word as to how He would solve the 
public problems of the day. We would like to be 
able to apply His teaching decisively in all direc¬ 
tions ; and we think that if it were applied correctly 


YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOR EVER 41 

Christ Himself would stand forth more vividly 
before men. Rut systems of Christian ethics are 
no more convincing than systems of Christian 
theology. The thought of the centrality of Jesus 
requires that we put them all into a secondary place. 
Christ Himself is His own evidence. His own words 
and actions among the peasantry of Galilee and 
among the rulers of His people in Jerusalem ; these 
set Him forth in His essential and commanding 
majesty. Even in His own day, He did not offer 
solutions for all the problems of the hour—slavery, 
for example—but He did adopt a characteristic 
attitude to social questions and social parties, and 
it is this above all things that men want to see 
in Him. 

It is then Jesus that we need to show forth to¬ 
day,—Jesus in His attitude to sickness, to suffering, 
to poverty, to riches, to cruelty, to intolerance, 
to entrenched privilege, to hard-heartedness, to 
hypocrisies and shams, to political parties, to 
governments, to ecclesiastical pride and national 
ambition. His words cannot be quoted as though 
they apply literally to modern conditions of life, 
but they leave no doubt as to where He stood on 
all essential social questions. His intense sympathy 
with suffering, His wrath against all trifling with 
human need, His hatred of pretence and untruth. 
His patience with the institutions of His time, 
coupled with the most fearless and radical criticism 
of them, His complete confidence in the overthrow 
of the evil in them, His internationahsm in the face 
of the most bigoted and religious nationalism the 
world has ever seen ; all these things stand out 


42 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

with vivid clearness. They reveal His spirit and 
nature in action : there is no need to translate them 
into social and political maxims for the hour, that 
would be to detract from their incisive power and 
not to add to it. To insist on the letter of the truth 
would be to forget the freedom of the spirit. Each 
man must make his own application in conduct for 
himself; for none can know his fellow or the 
cluster of circumstances through which he has to 
cleave his way. It is not for us to dictate to our 
neighbours what their conduct ought to be; and 
when we try to do so, we only induce repulsion and 
invite debate of details. 

We have, then, to preach, not duties, but Jesus 
as a living embodiment of amazing, rousing, and 
commanding love, in social situations utterly 
relevant to ours to-day, challenging every kind of 
person to awake from complacency and conven¬ 
tionality and play the brother to men. It is not 
necessary, nor possible, to translate Jesus into a 
new political code : it is only and supremely essen¬ 
tial to see Him through modern eyes. For if we 
are insensitive to the things which the world to-day 
values—in its best and most characteristic hours— 
we shall not see in Jesus, and therefore shall not 
commend to others the very things about Him 
which would win their admiration at the outset. 
We may relieve ourselves of the responsibility for 
solving all the ethical problems of the day before 
we dare to preach the Gospel; but we must be 
sensitive to these problems or we shall seem to make 
Jesus irrelevant to the life men have to live. 


YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOR EVER 43 

II. The Fact of Deliverance 

Of those who have put on record a vivid ex¬ 
perience of the Gospel, most have emphasised the 
moral revolution which it wrought in them. They 
entered into the experience of Christ through an 
experience of their own sinfulness contrasting with 
His holiness, or of their own incompleteness con¬ 
trasting with His fulness. A vivid realisation of 
the moral ideals embodied in Jesus filled them 
with a sense of their own unworthiness and with 
a desire to exchange it for His moral excellence 
There followed an experience in which the burden 
of their sinfulness and incompleteness passed away, 
and they were left with a surpassing sense of new 
joy and energy drawn from Him. For them, 
undoubtedly, the Christian life began with an 
experience of forgiveness ; but are we therefore to 
presume that it always should begin with such an 
experience ? Or are we to take more account of 
the numberless, though less striking instances in 
Christian biography, and within our own present 
knowledge, in which the Christian experience began 
with no such violence of recoil from the past, but 
rather with a sense of warming attraction towards 
the Christian offer of a more beautiful, more noble, 
and more satisfying life ? There is at least enough 
evidence of the variety of the types of experience in 
which Christ is central to allow us to approach the 
question as an open one. 

The strongest argument for making the presenta¬ 
tion of the Gospel turn on this appeal to a violent 
repentance is a practical one. It might have been 


44 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

said by the evangelists of an older school that if 
conversion to Christ is to be wrought in a revival 
meeting and in an hour, as sometimes it must, it 
can only be done with the aid of some strong 
emotional excitement. What more effective from 
this point of view than a vivid depiction of the evil 
that is in man ? Let him see himself as he is at 
his worst, in stark contrast with his ideal. The 
question is not, however, to be judged from the 
standpoint of “ the evangelist,” but from the 
standpoint of youth. If the natural pathway from 
the current types of paganism to Christian disciple- 
ship lies through a strong sense of sin, well and good : 
by that route we must strive to lead them ; but not 
because the experience of forgiveness has been 
characteristic of the great revivals of the past. 
For us the question is, what mental route or process 
is the right and fitting one for the pilgrims of to-day ? 
We must not prescribe for them an unsuitable 
gateway into the experience of being a Christian. 
We must rather describe that experience in terms 
which will help them to turn their faces in the 
direction in which they will find an open road. 

The Christian experience may be variously 
described as one of forgiveness, redemption, recon¬ 
ciliation, or rebirth. Put in its most simple terms 
it is an experience of inner harmony replacing a 
state of inner strife. The precise form which the 
experience takes will depend upon the outstanding 
character of the condition which immediately 
preceded it. If this has been one of moral defeat— 
say from an ungovernable temper or an ungovern¬ 
able lust—or if it has been one of impotence to do 


YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOR EVER 45 

the good one would, or of helplessness in face of 
others’ need, entrance into the Christian experience 
will mean primarily a new access of moral energy, 
either for defence or attack, for self-purification 
or for service. The experience will then be thought 
of most naturally in terms of rebirth and the gift 
of new life. If, again, the immediate past has been 
overshadowed by the sense of having incurred the 
condemnation of God for moral failure, or by a 
sense of rebellion against the conditions and obliga¬ 
tions of life, and revolt against God as their Author, 
the Christian experience will be felt primarily as 
one of forgiveness and reconciliation. But if the 
transition is from a state of aimlessness and futility, 
and want of a co-ordinating principle to give life 
unity and purpose, the Christian experience will 
be rather that of adoption into the service of 
Christ. 

In each case life has been delivered from its 
inner tension and disorder; but whether the 
experience of deliverance is thought of primarily 
in terms of rebirth or reconciliation or of adoption 
into the service of Christ, it is well to realise that in 
none of these cases does the form of the experience 
exhaust its content. What happens, for example, 
in the middle instance given above, is more than 
forgiveness or reconciliation, which, after all, are 
only the w r ords wdiich indicate the contrast between 
the soul’s previous sense of guiltiness or enmity 
toward God and its new state of content and 
satisfaction. The invariable fact in all these 
experiences is that whereas, at the one stage, God 
was felt to be outside our lives and we helpless, 


46 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

guilty, estranged, or aimless because of that, God 
is now felt to have become a fact inside our ex¬ 
perience. Because of that fact we are now morally 
energised and delivered from our former fear or 
hostility toward God, and are enriched by the gift 
of a purpose large enough to enlist and satisfy our 
every power. Man has opened the door and God 
has come in to him. He is known to be one near 
and available, friendly, and in the position of leader¬ 
ship and control. We have the Son of God for 
our Friend. 

The Gospel consists in the blessed fact of God’s 
will to enter, and man’s ability to receive God into 
«kis inner life ; and we must state it in terms which 
speak to the condition of our hearers. We need 
not try to induce in them any particular condi¬ 
tion of self-dissatisfaction of which they are not 
conscious, still less to insist on their experiencing a 
sense of need which, to them, seems artificial. 
There is surely in every human life already some 
need to which the fundamental Christian experience 
answers. We have to discover the prevailing form 
of it in our own day, and among whatever class of 
people we are trying to reach. I have already tried 
to analyse what I think to be the especial spiritual 
sensitiveness of the hour. In the light of that 
analysis, it does not seem possible to insist upon 
or to expect in young people of the present day any 
strong sense of guilt or of hostility to God. 

The sense of guilt is compounded of two notions : 
the sense of having grievously offended a binding 
moral code, and the expectation that penalties 
will be exacted. Neither of these notions is power- 


YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOR EVER 47 

ful in the common thought of the day. Present 
modes of thought throw much new light on the 
responsibility of the individual for his own action. 
Drunkenness, lust, bad temper, lying, and the rest 
—to-day are all regarded as being diseases as 
much as individual faults. At least, the individual 
is felt to share his responsibility for them rather 
lavishly with his heredity and his environment. 
The current analysis may exaggerate the part played 
in each individual destiny by these other supra- 
individual factors, but thev are real factors of which 
too little has been made in the past. To require 
the individual exactly to separate out his own 
individual responsibility from the wider responsi¬ 
bility of mankind is not desirable if it can be avoided, 
as I think it can. By all means let us emphasise 
a man’s share in the responsibility for the present 
and the future, and especially for the next step ; 
but do not let us seek to induce that sense of lonely 
guilt which was such an outstanding mark of the 
great Christian experience of the past. 

The modern sense of divided responsibility for 
the past has also a further result. It makes it 
difficult for the modern person to imagine himself 
standing as a criminal before a Judge, without 
detracting from his conception of the kindness and 
the justice of Almighty God. He will confess 
himself a rotter and a weakling, but it is another 
matter to regard himself guilty of the pains of hell. 
He may be made to feel the terrible possibilities of 
evil which lie in his nature if they are indulged, 
but he cannot conceive of God as identified with the 
principle of condemnation. Christ has taught the 


48 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

world too well for us to suppose that He will not be 
for us to the very last. If we are to stress the idea 
of redemption as deliverance from sin, we must 
think of sin more often in Paul’s thought of it as 
disastrous and culpable deficiency than in his 
thought of it as legal guilt. And in so doing we 
shall speak to the condition of our times. The 
modern need is typified by the boy who has made 
a sorry mess of his scoutmastership through 
thoughtlessness, or the girl who is disabled by her 
sense of instability and ineffectiveness, rather than 
by the man or woman pursued by the sense of 
guilt or of remorse. 

So then the characteristic spiritual longing of the 
world to-day is not so much a longing to be blame¬ 
less, as a longing to “ make good.” The spirit 
yearns less to escape the contamination of material 
interests and pursuits than to put the impress of its 
ideals upon the material and social world. And in 
this aspiration it is nearer the mind of Jesus than 
it has ever been before, for the religion of Jesus was 
far less occupied with the aim of self-purification 
than with the aim of sympathetic service. Jesus 
never encouraged people to dwell very much upon 
their past faults, if only they were willing to start 
out afresh with an adequate life aim and an adequate 
life motive. And the aim and the motive which 
He commended might be stated very simply, in 
some such terms as these. “ God is your Father, 
man is your brother, the world might be very good 
and beautiful but at present it is very dark and sad. 
Set about to make life good for your brother, and 
God will take care of you all, both in this world and 


YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOR EVER 49 

in the next. Your past may have been full of 
wickedness, yet you may leave it all behind if you 
will choose me for your Master now. Lose your 
wrong self in serving your brother as I shall show 
you how.” 

And here it is that Jesus touches our deepest 
sense of need. For the heart of the world stirs to 
His call to make life good and happy; but it wearies, 
too, with its sense of failure to achieve its aim. 
There is a surging passion of hope in the hearts of 
men that this world might be made into a much 
more happy and homely place for all men, and not 

onlv for those few who are fortunate and able—but 

* 

the hope is turned to ashes when we contemplate 
the failure of humanity to realise its dream. Men 
need Jesus to give them such a will to use the world 
rightly, as will be corrupted neither by selfishness 
nor by sensuality, nor dissipated by weariness and 
disappointment. 

Thus the heart hungers for an understanding 
of the things of the spirit which will not set the rich 
appreciation of life at variance with the love of 
God, and for a power to turn the dream of human 
brotherhood into an actualised social order. Now 
these two things have been met in Christ—in 
Christ, though not in Christians generally. Yet, 
for some at least, the lovely humanity of Jesus has 
ended the war between the love of human happiness 
and the love of God : between joy in the world, 
beautiful with its profusion of gifts of light and 
colour and gaiety, and joy in the perfect ordering 
of the spiritual life. This harmonisation of the 
various hungers of the spirit, this resolution of the 

E 


50 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

conflict between the lure of the natural and the 
lure of the spiritual, is part of the experience of 
multitudes of Christian people. Those who have 
this experience have a gospel for the present 
age, and those who have not this experience have 
not. 

And, further, there are those who have, in their 
own experience, an attitude to their fellows, born 
of their fellowship with Christ, which makes them 
sure that the problem of organising the world as a 
social brotherhood is no vain dream. They can 
look along the line of their own inner development 
and see how the will to dominate and despise and 
exploit others passes away before the desire to 
understand and serve and equip them. And they 
can see that the new will to love which is thus born 
in them is more resourceful, more determined, more 
constantly energised by deep satisfaction in success, 
and therefore more potent against difficulties and 
more resilient after failure, than the old will to fight 
for one’s own hand. And knowing this in some 
measure by experience in themselves and others, 
they see that the Kingdom of God canot fail to 
come, and in this respect also the stress of fear and 
doubt is resolved in their souls. They are delivered, 
reborn, released from the thraldom of any desires 
whose satisfaction ends in themselves alone. The 
Kingdom of God is within them. They are become 
the sons of God in that they share the Father’s 
purpose and freely desire to forward it, and in so 
far as this is so, they have a gospel of redemption 
for their day. 

The witness of the Gospel to man’s deliverance 


YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOR EVER 51 

from sin thus takes a special character from the 
special form of man’s present need and aspiration. 
Our deliverance in Christ is not primarily to be 
represented as a deliverance from past sins’ conse¬ 
quences, nor as the breaking of the power of present 
temptation to lust or excess : it is still more a 
deliverance out of a life of loneliness and from a 
use of the world which ministered to mere pride 
and selfishness into a life of social service and a 
use of the world which ministers to the satisfaction 
of every hunger of an awakened personality. This 
leads us on to fresh points about the nature of the 
Christian life. 

III. The Fact of Communion with God 

We have now to speak of the fact of Com¬ 
munion with God, which constitutes a large element 
of the Christian witness, appealing as it does to 
the sense of loneliness, impotence, and futility, 
which haunts humanity. It is one of the change¬ 
less facts of Christian experience that the soul can 
enjoy such an intimate communion with God as 
takes away the sense of spiritual loneliness and 
gives enduring value to the whole of life. One of 
the features of adolescence is its sense of being on 
the edge of great experiences and of finding ex¬ 
perience constantly dissatisfying, of being called 
to great achievement and being doomed to feeble¬ 
ness. Communion with God, in little things and in 
big, is the remedy for this. 

In the great classic instances, Christian com¬ 
munion with God takes several leading forms. Now, 


52 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

it is a re-enforcement in fighting individual tempta¬ 
tion ; now it is a companionship in making known 
the Gospel; now it is a sharing of God’s Passion 
to save the world from loss. The Christian witness 
needs to be more full and emphatic and specific 
in its testimony, both to the reality and to the range 
of this experience of contact with God Himself. 
Moreover, in witnessing to the immature, we must 
not confine ourselves to the maturer elements 
in this experience. To what did Jesus call His 
followers in the first instance ? Was it to a life of 
desperate conflict with the ranked forces of evil ? 
Or was it not rather to a thrilling ministry of social 
service, to a joyful companionship and a dazzling 
prospect of signal human success ? He taught 
them to rejoice in the flowers, to steal out into the 
night for quiet thought, to frequent the wedding 
feast, to taste life’s sweetness with Him and with 
His followers, to be care-free and adventurous. 
Without doubt His call to them was from the first 
a call to an arduous enterprise, but not at all a 
recondite enterprise, not a campaign whose objects 
and rewards were obscure, or intangible, or divorced 
from sense experience and daily life. Nor was 
the note of sacrifice predominant at the first, 
though the note of fidelity was always present in 
His call to men. Only after a considerable experi¬ 
ence of His companionship did He ask them to go 
up to Jerusalem to witness His Passion, and to 
only a few of them did He reveal the fiercest 
conflicts of His soul in Gethsemane’s Garden. 
Surely there are many of our younger brothers and 
sisters to whom we should offer simply Christ’s 


YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOR EVER 53 

companionship in the enjoyment of life and the 
fulfilling of kindly offices of service, and wait long 
before we ask them to fight His hardest battles. 

The warfare of the Kingdom of God demands 
discipline and evokes heroism ; and we should not 
hide the fact, but neither should we forget that 
there are some who find the greater part of their 
companionship with Him in art and music and the 
search for truth, in the service of the home, or in 
the common ministries of human life. These things 
are by Him touched with new values, new meanings, 
new emotions. Of course we must summon Christ’s 
disciples always to the work of building up in 
Christ’s name a Kingdom of God upon earth ; but 
we must offer them communion with God, not only 
in fighting for ideals against opponents, or in 
fighting for deliverance from sin, but in building 
good houses, planting delightful gardens, making 
beautiful clothes, and in other ways ministering 
to the joyfulness of life. These things are a part 
of His Kingdom, and in them we have communion 
with Him who created all things and delighted to 
pronounce them good. We must not allow the 
thought of communion with God to be associated 
only with moral struggles and Church services, and 
what is narrowly described as Christian work. We 
must let it be known that God can be found at the 
end of every avenue along which the human spirit 
is impelled to seek an ideal end. The witness of 
one type of mind cannot be universally convincing, 
but the cumulative witness of the saints and the 
seers, the prophets and the apostles, the servants 
of human welfare, the artists and the truth seekers. 


54 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

is overwhelming testimony to the reality and range 
of man’s possible communion with God. 

Clutton-Brock has argued, in The Ultimate 
Belief , that the activities of the Spirit are not one, 
nor two, but three. The Spirit is concerned for 
goodness, for truth and for beauty, and there is an 
ultimate good to be found in each. They are all 
equally qualities of God, and the spirit life is incom¬ 
plete unless it is concerned with them all. Starve 
any one of them and the others suffer. And to-day 
especially, because the spiritual desire of man to 
enjoy beauty and to create beauty is discouraged 
and denied, the spirit of man is stunted and en¬ 
feebled. And especially youth, which needs the 
romance of the spirit to counterbalance the excite¬ 
ment of the romance of the flesh, is deprived of one 
of its essential safeguards and kept back from one 
of its essential goals. We shall return to this 
subject in a later chapter, but it is important to 
recognise at once how many avenues of human 
interest lead up to man’s communion with God, and 
to connect the name of Tesus as much with ex- 
periences which move the heart by their beauty as 
with those which commend themselves to the 
conscience as right. Only so can we find in our 
religion the simultaneous satisfaction of all the 
hungers of the spirit, the fitting climax of all 
experiences. Religious experience has sometimes 
been thought of as a separate department of 
experience not connected with the common ex¬ 
periences of life. We ought rather to find ourselves 
in communion with God at the apex of every form 
of experience, in the exercise of every faculty when 



YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOR EVER 55 

we do our best and keenest, in the pursuit of every 
good purpose when we let ourselves go. At each 
turn in the road of life we may discover something 
so good that we can only bow our heads in thankful¬ 
ness and reverence and say. It is the Lord. If we 
have known Jesus in His most characteristic 
moments—in the crowd and in the temple, in the 
Judgment Hall and on the Cross—we shall find Him 
beside us also by hillside and lakeside and fireside, 
and our communion with the highest will be always 
and altogether in Him. 

IV. The Fact of the Church 

We pass to consider the fourth great component 
of the evangelical witness, the fact of the Church. 
There is offered to man in the fellowship of the 
disciples of Christ a social experience in which it is 
made easier for him to cherish his ideals, to fight 
off his temptations, to strengthen his affection for 
his fellows, to form habits of service and devotion. 
By its ordered life of prayer and worship he is 
helped to certify himself of things unseen, and 
to acquaint himself with God. The credit of the 
Church goes up and down as the generations come 
and go. It is behindhand now in this, and now in 
that; and there are times, like our own, when the 
world is out of patience with its slow-changing 
traditions of thought and speech. And yet, 
through all, there is preserved in it a treasury of 
knowledge of the ways in which God speaks to 
man and man responds to God. 

The Church is, in the first place, the centre of 


56 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

man’s worship, his place of communion with God. 
Incidentally, it is his place of instruction in that 
moral philosophy of life which his faith in God 
implies ; his school in which to study the funda¬ 
mental nature of God’s universe, the place he holds 
in it and the conduct befitting his divine sonship. 
This distinction between man’s direct experience 
of God in worship and his derived ideas of truth and 
duty is most important at the present time. For it 
is necessary to emphasise at once the sureness and 
reality of the experience of God to which men give 
expression in their public worship, and the in¬ 
adequacy and incompleteness of the language in 
which they express their faith. The fact of spiritual 
energy resident in the Church, the means of grace 
which it affords, the comfort and support of its 
fellowship, the inspiration and help of its worship : 
to these things we need ever to testify as part of 
the evangelic witness. But that reality of grace 
and inspiration does not guarantee the rightness or 
appropriateness of all that the Churches say or do. 
Like every other long-lived institution, the Church 
must always tend to fall behind the times in some 
of its official teaching, and especially in times of 
change is it hard for the public presentation of the 
truth to meet the needs of young and old at the same 
time. Christian doctrine speaks the language of 
philosophy, and that is a language which is con¬ 
stantly changing and ceasing to carry its old 
meanings ; and Christian morals deal with social 
relationships which may change their character so 
entirely in a generation as to make maxims which 
were once true and vital, seem irrelevant and trite. 


YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOR EVER 57 

It is, therefore, part of the wisdom of those who 
have to preach the Gospel to remember that the 
Church is fallible in its thinking and prone in its 
life and teaching to fall behind the times. Other¬ 
wise they may raise expectations which they cannot 
fulfil, and put upon youth a burden which it cannot 
bear. Thus, for example, in bringing new recruits 
into the Christian fellowship to-day, it is well to 
realise that many of them may not find their 
spiritual home at all easily in the societies and 
services of the Church as these are at present 
organised. It may be necessary to devise new and 
freer forms of fellowship to meet their needs. These 
freer forms of Church life are doubtless already 
coming into existence in the interest of those already 
within the Church ; but the recognition of the needs 
of those outside might help to bring them into 
vogue and give them shape and vigour all the 
more speedily. 

One would like to be able to say of the Church, 
that in its fellowship every spiritual desire will be 
satisfied and every spiritual gift will be enriched ; 
but one must be content to discriminate between the 
spiritual gifts which are at present fostered in the 
life of the Church as it is, and those which only may 
be. What we may assert without fear of exaggera¬ 
tion is that multitudes of Christian people are 
brought to Jesus through the worship and fellow¬ 
ship of the Church, in such a way that their sense of 
God is constantly refreshed; their thought of Him 
constantly enriched ; their desire to be like Him 
constantly quickened; their insight into right 
living constantly deepened ; and they themselves 


58 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

brought ever closer and closer into conformity with 
His spirit. In spite of the inadequacy of the 
specific teaching they receive, or of the form in 
which they worship, the spirit of Jesus is for them 
truly embodied, and to them truly communicated. 
And of many of those to whom the formal defects 
are fully obvious, the same is true ; the spirit 
triumphs over the letter because it was the spirit 
which first gave the letter life. Christ is Himself 
effectively present for them. The divine-human 
fellowship is experienced by them in quickening 
power because they do indeed share God’s purpose 
and not merely profess His name ; it is the more 
potent exactly in proportion as they share imagina¬ 
tively and explicitly, as well as silently and 
symbolically, in the furtherance of His purpose, and 
learn to know it in all its breadth and range. 

So much we can emphatically claim on behalf of 
the fellowship of the Christian Church ; but at the 
same time we are bound to acknowledge that in 
some respects the Churches tend to quench the 
Spirit of Christ in those whom they influence, 
because they fail to identify themselves fully and 
clearly with His social programme. And so it 
comes to pass that there is a spirit in the world 
to-day, outside the Churches, in some ways more 
responsive to the call of Christ than the spirit 
embodied in our present Christian institutions. It 
is a spirit quickened indeed by influences which 
Christ has wielded both within and without the 
Church, expressing itself here and there in other 
movements while as yet it is not fully embodied in 
the organised life of the Church. Until it finds its 


YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND FOR EVER 59 

adequate expression within the Church, the full 
power of the witness of the Christian fellowship 
cannot be felt, because the characteristic longing of 
this generation for spiritual fellowship will remain 
unsatisfied. In the Church, in the past, our fathers 
in different ages strove to relate the Person of 
Christ to their conceptions of Justice and Govern¬ 
ment and Providence and to their hope of the 
hereafter, because that was the direction in which 
their spirits craved for a truer understanding of life ; 
they succeeded, and were satisfied. So also in its 
turn the present generation longs to relate the 
Person of Christ to its conceptions of human 
personality and progress, to discover in Him the 
power and the way to transform the social life of 
the world, and to read the whole movement of 
history in the light He has shed on life’s ideals and 
purposes. Youth especially is moved by this 
aspiration, and needs help in Christian fellowship 
in order to relate it to the Person of Christ. To 
those who believe in the divine calling of the 
Church, and perceive this, it is simply inevitable 
that the Churches will presently awaken to this 
need and meet it; but we are bound at the same 
time to recognise that whilst their failure to do so 
continues, it must greatly diminish the power of 
their appeal. 

This, however, raises problems which would 
take us beyond the scope of the present chapter, 
and are best left alone till a later point in the book. 
It will be well, before we look any further at these 
questions of Church organisation, that we should 
try to envisage the Christian conception of life, 


60 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

endeavouring to see our ordinary social interests 
and activities in the light which Jesus throws upon 
them. It is probable that the point of contact 
between the Gospel and many modern minds will 
be the view of life for which the Gospel stands. Such 
questions as those of the relation of business 
standards to Christian standards, and of the place 
and value of play in the world must be answered 
as Jesus would be likely to answer them before the 
upshot of the invitation to be a Christian can be 
fairly understood. Silence regarding them can 
but endorse the widespread, though quite errone¬ 
ous, impression that Christianity must be kept 
as far as possible from modern business, and the 
Christian kept equally far from many of the amuse¬ 
ments he would otherwise most naturally choose. 
To these matters we now therefore turn. 


CHAPTER IV 

THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF WORK 

In this and the next chapter we shall attempt to 
sketch in bare outline a Christian conception of Life, 
the object being to bring the fundamental ideas of 
Christianity into touch with the common problems 
and interests of work-a-day folk. If we deal with 
life under the two comprehensive headings of work 
and leisure, we shall not need to leave out much 
that matters ; though the treatment can only be 
exceedingly summary in the space available. All 
that is possible is a mention of some outstanding 
points in the common conception of life that 
raise a barrier to the understanding of the Christian 
conception, and thus prevent the acceptance of 
the Gospel. For example, if it be thought that 
business life is bound to be lived on a lower plane 
than that required by the teaching of Jesus, the 
door of many minds is shut at once against Christi¬ 
anity. Or, again, if play be thought of as essentially 
a frivolous matter from the spiritual standpoint, 
youth is set at once in opposition to the things of 
the spirit. We shall expound the Christian con¬ 
ception of life no more than is necessary to counter 
views like these which inhibit the understanding 
and acceptance of the Gospel at the outset : not 
attempting a treatment full enough to supply working 

61 


62 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

guidance for Christian conduct in special cases. 
We want a view of work and play which satisfies 
the instincts of the Christian as right and good, 
whilst at the same time it satisfies the instincts of 
the practical man as sound and practical. 

Of the two subjects, work and leisure, leisure 
might seem to be the more suitable to begin with, 
as being the more interesting of the two for the 
majority, and, therefore, the best point of contact 
for the discussion of life’s values ; but the uses of 
leisure are so bound up with the results of work 
that it will be better to consider first the Christian 
conception of work. 

Let us begin by asserting roundly that Christ 
would have the business life of every man made as 
truly God’s business as was His own, when He said, 
“ Wist ye not that I must be about My Father’s 
business ? ” In all his working life, a clerk or 
artisan is to seek first the Kingdom of God, just as 
surely and truly as is a missionary or hospital 
nurse. The line is still drawn firmly between the 
sacred and the secular in popular thought, in spite 
of all the rhetoric of Christian preachers—and it 
will continue to be so drawn until it is erased from 
the chart of life just at the point where it is drawn 
between business and religion. To bring this to 
pass we must take our stand firmly on the ground 
that those who are ministering truly to the welfare 
of human life on its material side are doing work 
which is as essential to the Kingdom of God upon 
earth as that of those who are ministering directly 
to men’s minds and spirits. This view is based 
upon the manifest concern of Jesus Himself for the 


/ 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF WORK 63 

welfare of the material life, His ministry to the 
needs of the human body, His conjunction of 
physical and spiritual well-being in His own action. 
From this alone we can be confident that all work 
which is truly adding to the fulness and wholesome¬ 
ness of human life on its physical side is work for 
the Kingdom, having its own intrinsic value on 
the spiritual plane. 

We are thus led on to ground where innumerable 
questions may arise as to the particular value of 
this or that method or product of business life to the 
real welfare of the world—material and spiritual. 
We can attempt no more than to lay down broad 
principles without application except in very few 
points by way of illustration. What we are looking 
for is a set of standards which will judge whether a 
given line of business action is right and good, at 
once from a practical and from a religious stand¬ 
point. We are trying to judge all work by the 
standard of its intrinsic worth to human life,—not 
separating the physical from the spiritual,—rein¬ 
forcing our common practical standards by the 
absolute standards of religion. Doing so we shall 
find at least the following five points of general 
importance, the first two relating to the work in 
itself and the rest concerning the relations between 
the persons involved in the work. 

I. The Standards of Good Work 

In the first place, the work of a Christian must 
have real social usefulness , directly or indirectly, and 
he must be persuaded that it has, and find inspiration 


64 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

for energetic and efficient effort in so thinking. 
“ What are you doing ? 57 said a visitor to a man 
working in a stonevard in New York. “ Earning 
five dollars a day, 77 was the reply. “ What are 
you doing ? 77 said the visitor to the next man in 
the stoneyard. “ Making these stones square, 77 
was the reply. “ What are you doing ? 77 said the 
visitor to the third man. “ Helping to build a 
cathedral, 77 said he. Each man of the three was 
doing all these things, but different things were 
uppermost in their minds. In a Christian con¬ 
ception of work the prominent thing will be the 
quality of the service rendered, the value that some 
one shall find in the thing that is being done. 

Such an idea of service is easier in some trades 
than in others. Those who grow food, make 
clothes, build houses, should easily take hold of it. 
In many cases processes are so divided that some 
imagination is needed to realise the service rendered. 
Yet a man who only tacks on the soie of a boot 
must realise that it is to the making of boots he is 
contributing, and there can be few processes in 
which it would not be possible to discover the value 
of the thing made. Workers on railways and 
telegraph systems may and do feel the essential 
value of their work. Rough work like that of 
mining and scavenging inspires the same sense of 
public service in some people. But makers of beer 
and dispensers of spirits may have to ask themselves 
whether the good or the evil predominates in the 
use to which they minister. Brokers who encourage 
their clients to trade in “ margins, 77 organisers of 
public gambles and lotteries, and all procurers for 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF WORK 65 

the baser passions of men will hardly attempt to 
justify their occupations by the criterion of public 
usefulness. 

There are, of course, many things which a worker 
may be asked to do which directly diminish the 
value of his services to the public. It helps no one 
to saturate skins with water before they are weighed 
for sale. It is humiliating to be engaged in adulter¬ 
ating useful goods or crying up the value of poor 

ones. The tricks of trade will raise in manv a 

✓ 

man’s mind difficult questions as to where he should 
draw the line or how far his responsibility runs. 
This is not the place to propound typical cases for 
conscientious decision. But things will never be 
rightly decided unless there is first in each man’s 
mind a positive ideal of service, so that he will not 
tolerate giving his life to work which is not, on the 
whole, of real and substantial public benefit. 

In the second place, the work of a Christian man 
should be a medium for his true self-expression and a 
source of joy to him. He must put into his work as 
much of himself as the nature of his work allows, 
and in doing so he will find joy in it. If there is 
in it any opening whatever for the exercise of in¬ 
telligence, artistry, distinction of touch or creative 
originality of any kind, he must take advantage oi 
it. His nature being spiritual, he ought to be 
discontented to do anything that does not admit 
some real expression of his intelligence and his 
goodwill. At the least he can work with concentra¬ 
tion, zest, and energy ; and though the routine and 
repetition character of much modern industry makes 
any real originality difficult, yet there is more room 

F 


66 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

for this than many suppose, and it is essential to 
seize all the opportunities there are. Only by doing 
so can the work of the world be lifted to a spiritual 
plane. When work is done without keenness, 
character suffers. It is deteriorating to slack ; for 
it robs the slacker both of his own personal vigour, 
and of his sense of doing his best for his fellows. 
If (as is alleged) the conditions of modern industry 
make it unsportsmanlike for some of the best 
workers to work as fast as they easily can, lest they 
set a pace which their fellows cannot follow, the 
permanent remedy for it cannot be mere slacking, 
for that reduces both the worker’s vitality and the 
world’s material and moral wealth. 

There are, of course, a host of trivial and 
monotonous occupations in industry and business 
into which it is not easy to put a great deal of 
personality. But it may yet be possible to put a 
little. We must not overlook the possibility of 
putting skill and care and spiritual feeling into the 
doing of the simplest acts. There is opportunity 
enough for a real expression of character in the 
handwriting in which ledgers are kept, in the finish 
with which a nail is driven home, in the cleaning 
and tidying of a home. Few people can have 
occupations which call out their capacities to the 
full, or duties which do not irk and cramp them at 
some points. Few, on the other hand, can have 
occupations to which they cannot bring some 
standard and some finish beyond what is demanded 
in their bond, and it is this that makes their work 
an expression of the spirit and an offering to the 
glory of God. 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF WORK 67 

Along such lines it becomes possible to find in 
work of the most prosaic kind a source of real joy. 
Many have testified to the entire change which has 
come over them when they have found a new 
mental adjustment to their work, affecting their 
attitude of spirit toward it. Without any change 
in the work, some change in themselves has turned 
it from a weariness of the flesh to a delightful game ; 
and even when the work remains in itself uncon¬ 
genial, it may be possible to find in it an opportunity 
to perfect some gift of patience or perseverance 
or ingenuity which one wishes to acquire and can 
learn to regard as worth the pain and trouble 
of the process by which it is gained. Certain 
it is that a very great deal of the discomfort and 
distress which many now feel in their work would 
pass away if they could turn themselves about and 
take a different view of it. Certain also is it that 
many have found in their religion a means of so 
turning themselves about as to find pleasure in 
drudgery of every kind.* 

It is indeed an essential quality of the Christian 
life that it should find pleasure in all that it does. 
The creative joy that is felt by all true craftsmen 
in work well done, whether the work be manual or 
mental, is easy enough to understand. In it a man 
positively shares the joy of God the Creator : he 
is indeed continuing the Creator’s work and his joy 
is the sign and seal of it. There is also an imported 
joy when uncongenial tasks are done for some one 
else’s sake—for the service of the city or the mainte¬ 
nance of “ weans and wife.” If there is not a way 

* Cf. the well-known tract Blessed be Drudgery . 


68 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

of looking at a job that enables one to throw 
oneself into it with some satisfying purpose, then 
one should, if a Christian, take steps to get out of it. 
For joy is the mark of the Christian life. Clear 
witness to the possibility of enjoying humdrum 
routine is a thing which the world needs greatly, 
and some give it with good effect. There are many 
who would be a long step nearer to believing in 
Christianity if they could only have as their working 
companions people who had learned to enjoy their 
work. Only by the contagion of such examples 
will the world be won for Christianity and qualified 
to depend less upon the present hateful spur of 
mere competition to call forth its labour. And in 
proportion as this happens, the conditions of work 
will themselves be changed and made more favour¬ 
able to the expression of creative joy. 


II. The Personal Relations Work brings 

Turning now from the work itself to the relations 
in which it places us to other people, we have to 
notice, firstly, the opportunity work affords for 
personal contact with individuals. The Christian 
principle here is plain and well understood. To all 
our fellow-workers we are bound as Christians to be 
brotherly. We are bound to be interested in them, 
to cultivate their society, to enter into their interests, 
to protect them if they need protection, socially or 
morally. We must share with them anything we 
possess and value that can be shared, and especially 
should we share with them an attitude to our work 
which is invigorating, energising, inspiring, and 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF WORK 69 

conducive to the religious life. In a word, we have 
to be good fellows to our fellow workers, and that 
in spite of all the difficulties which incompati¬ 
bilities of temperament and ideal will produce. To 
the non-religious this will not seem possible unless 
they are temperamentally sociable ; but the Gospel 
offers a new nature to those who accept it, a nature 
full of the spirit and temper of goodwill, together 
with a constantly renewed supply of spiritual 
energy to restore again the frayed edges of good 
temper when it has been ragged and torn. Con¬ 
stancy and cheerfulness are recognised to be the 
staple ingredients of good fellowship without which 
it can hardly maintain its name and reputation. 

In some working environments, it is something 
to be able to bear the shocks and buffets of social 
intercourse without loss of temper. But an active 
goodwill would go further than that and work 
constructively to build up a happier and more 
healthy social life. For this end testimony is borne 
to the value of cultivating social fellowship with 
one’s work-fellows in leisure hours : it humanises 
working relationships, and engenders readier sym¬ 
pathies. Another duty of goodwill is the protec¬ 
tion, wherever opportunities offer, of those who 
are morally weak against those who are morally 
corrupting, a duty which may arise in numberless 
instances in office and factory life, in such matters 
as sweepstakes, enforced drinking, and undesirable 
conversation. 

It belongs also to the duty of Christian goodwill 
to take a hand in trade-union activities, seeing that 
these are the accepted constitutional means of 


7 o WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

working for better conditions in industry, and one’s 
duty to make one’s neighbour’s life as satisfying as 
possible cannot be fulfilled if this means of influence 
is neglected. Each of us is called to try to improve 
the conditions under which our fellows work, if 
they are ill-considered or unsatisfactory; the 
quality of the work they are expected to do, if it is 
degrading ; the pay they receive, if it is unjust. 
We are our brother’s keepers to see that they are 
not put under too great a strain, either physical, 
mental, or moral; to guard the weak and un¬ 
developed against too great fatigue or monotony 
in their work, or against work so mechanical that it 
contains no educative element, or so shoddy and 
second-rate in type that it is positively demoral¬ 
izing ; against a social environment which is 
morally corroding. This responsibility need not 
turn a Christian into a busybody or a prig, though 
sometimes it has done so. We are not, in the first 
instance, called to press our moral and religious 
principles upon the attention of other people, 
though there may be times when it would be weak 
and cowardly not to express them. Undoubtedly, 
however, the first duty is to function happily in the 
social life of one’s work-fellows. 

In the next place, through our work, we are all 
personally related, not only with our immediate 
work-fellows, but with a vast unknown public who 
benefit, or it may be suffer, from our labour. To 
this wider public also we are bound as Christians 
always to behave as good neighbours. We have a 
duty to them which is not fulfilled by simple sub¬ 
servience to the law of the market. We have to 



CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF WORK 71 

manifest our intelligent control of the blind 
machinery of supply and demand, by a direct 
exercise of goodwill in deciding how far we are 
willing to benefit individually, or as a trade group, 
by the ups and downs of commercial fortune. In 
this both those who hold positions of control in 
industry and commerce, and those who occupy 
subordinate posts, will no doubt be confronted with 
many challenging conditions. For instance, one 
realises that there are endless complexities in the 
finance of big businesses which make all moral 
principles difficult to apply. But this at least can 
be said with confidence, that the problem of the 
right distribution of wealth will not be solved till 
Christian men and women will always regard them¬ 
selves as being in friendly partnership with the 
public, from whom they will be no more desirous 
of taking the lion’s share of the benefit of their 
work than they would of making a corner in fruit 
at a banquet. This refusal to regard any persons 
whose lives we touch indirectly as other than 
friends is essential to our acquiring the spirit which 
will inspire the solution of our own part of the 
social problem. The principle of service will also 
put a limit upon the amount that any man with 
a social conscience will wish to take as the reward 
for his own work. He will look sharply at high 
profits, and values due to the adventitious advan¬ 
tages of monopoly. He will not wish to create a 
situation in which his profit is secured by the ruin 
of other men, and will do much to avoid such 
contingencies. 

And, lastly, we are bound as Christians to work 


72 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

towards the transformation of our present industrial 
processes and business arrangements. We want to 
create a more Christian system, so conducted that 
the co-operation of man with man which it entails 
is friendly and congenial and helpful to all con¬ 
cerned. We want methods of work and organisa¬ 
tion that are better calculated to exercise and 
develop the many-sided personalities which they 
employ, more stimulating to the joy of work and 
to the friendliness of fellow workers, and more 
successful in distributing the wealth of the world 
widely to all who can benefit by it. This is the last 
and hardest part of the task of fellowship in the 
world of work. 

We are not forgetting the difficulties of realising 
this ideal. Beyond the basal difficulty of wresting 
all we want from nature, there is the difficulty of 
overcoming the conflict of interests which arise 
between man and man. These difficulties as we 
know have given rise to traditional inequalities, 
traditional injustices, traditional feuds between 
rival groups in the community. There are all kinds 
of sources of misunderstanding and conflict both in 
the control of industry and the distribution of its 
gains. The organisation of industry and commerce 
cannot be exactly what it would be if every one 
were industrious and every one as eager for the 
rights of others as for his own. Industry would not 
be inspired, it would only be exploded, if produc¬ 
tivity and discipline were sacrificed to a sentimental 
and doctrinaire view of the way in which we should 
treat one another. An employer who has to con¬ 
sider his markets has only to a very small extent 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF WORK 73 

a free hand in fixing the conditions which he offers 
to his employees, and they in their turn must be 
governed in their dealings with him, not only by 
the personal goodwill they may feel towards him, 
but by the loyalties they owe to their fellow workers 
in their own and other trades. We should not for 
one moment minimise the difficulties of the position. 
Few people of goodwill will be able to realise any¬ 
thing like their ideal of fellowship in their dealings 
with one another in the business world, or in the 
professional world. 

And yet the necessary condition of loyalty to a 
Christian ideal of life is a wholehearted attempt to 
put all business relations on to a footing of real 
goodwill, of mutual understanding, of friendly 
give and take,—a sharing in the benefits and 
responsibilities of the common enterprise, approxi¬ 
mating more and more toward equality as better 
and better means are found for developing the 
capacities of all involved. Seek ye first the 
Kingdom of God means in commerce and industry, 
that fellowship is placed in the forefront of a man’s 
practical business aims. And so far as a man is 
responsive to this ideal, he becomes a co-worker 
with God and a vehicle of the Spirit in the world 
process by which God is evolving a social common¬ 
wealth upon the earth. He will have “ experience ” 
of God in the progressive discovery of himself as 
a means by which the Spirit of God brings increasing 
goodness into the working world. The higher a 
man estimates the openness of his own personality 
to the influence of the Spirit of God, the more will 
he be impelled to encourage and expect his fellows 


74 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

to respond to higher motives and appeals to their 
better qualities. He will believe so deeply in the 
fundamental qualities of human nature, that he 
will reckon it a shame not to give men and women 
everywhere a chance to develop from being merely 
machines, kept at work by fear of starving, into free 
persons working from interest in their work and the 
will to do their best with the rest. He will keep 
before him always the practical hope that both the 
methods and the motives of the working world can 
be made more worthy of human personality and 
of God’s offer to inspire men to co-operate happily. 
He will be prepared to work hard for that hope 
and risk a great deal at times to give effect to it, 
trusting a man sometimes for more than he has yet 
proved himself worth, continuing to do good work 
though some one else exploits it, sacrificing profits 
rather than let honourable principles go by the 
board. And in all this he will not be governed by 
the conventional standards of the time, or worried 
by the letter of even the Christian law, but will let 
the Spirit of Christ lead him where it will. 

III. The Crux of the Business 

And here we face an almost overwhelming 
difficulty. It is the fact that many find themselves 
engaged in work which seems intrinsically so futile, 
so repressive, so monotonous, so bound up with 
malpractice, so unfriendly toward competitors, or 
so embittered by the sense of injustice or exploita¬ 
tion suffered by themselves, that it is difficult for 
them to regard all this idealism as anything but 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF WORK 75 

airy nonsense. We are brought here to a problem 
which can only be resolved by Christ. We are 
up against the inherent evil of this present life, and 
the problem of the vexation and pain and defeat 
which are an inevitable part of it, and we have to 
seek the attitude of Jesus to all this evil and learn 
to adopt it. Attempting to do so we find these two 
principles which go down to the very heart of Christi¬ 
anity, and which apply directly to our problem. 

First of all, we have to recognise, as Jesus 
recognised, that for the time being at least, evil 
and suffering are here, and we have got to accept 
them and bear them whilst at the same time we 
lay hold of other elements in our experience which 
justify us in believing that the supreme and ultimate 
fact of life is God’s love and Fatherhood. The 
great life, and in the end, the happy life, is the life 
which takes up its share, and more than its share, 
of this pain and sorrow, refusing to be embittered 
by it. This attitude to life is peculiarly that of 
Christ, and it is only from Him that we can 
acquire it. 

On this view, work, even hard monotonous and 
wearing work, with its conditions of fixity and 
inexorable necessity, is not due entirely to the 
selfishness of employers and possessors, or to the 
particular cussedness of the present economic and 
industrial system under which we work. The main 
difficulty is at any rate partly due to the hard facts 
of nature. When all is done that can be done to 
prevent the oppression and exploitation of the 
weak, there will still be much that is wearing and 
hard and monotonous that cannot be eliminated 


76 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

from life. There will still be much that must be 
borne. And apparently this is part of God’s 
ordering. Nature is beautiful enough and generous 
enough, but it has elements of intractability and 
ugliness that test our wills and our ideals to the 
uttermost. It may be that they are there in order 
that the struggle with them shall make man finer 
and nobler. At any rate, they are there, and it 
would seem that Jesus quietly accepted them as 
part of the unalterable factors of experience in 
which we must simply acquiesce. His own acqui¬ 
escence in these stern conditions of life led to no 
kind of fatalism nor any steeling of the heart 
toward sufferers, as we well know. But it remains 
a fact that Jesus, who knew so much of the trouble 
of the world and did so much to alleviate its suffer¬ 
ing, never seemed oppressed by its existence. 

We have an inkling here of the Christian’s 
proper attitude to those hard facts of experience 
which will remain while human skill and goodwill 
are doing their best for the amelioration of the 
conditions of working life. Are we as Christians to 
resent these permanent irreducible hard conditions, 
or such of them as we cannot in our own time 
change ? Or shall we accept them as, here and now, 
if not ultimately and ideally, God’s goodwill, in 
which we may find our chance of peace and salva¬ 
tion ? Is not this side of things included in Jesus’ 
idea of the daily cross, which seems so integral a 
thing in His experience and in the experience He 
foretold for His disciples ? The thought can be 
misrepresented, and misunderstood, but we ignore 
what is true in it at our peril. Truth is truth, and 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF WORK 77 

Jesus surely saw things in truer proportion than we 
in our impatience are likely to do. Reconciliation 
with the world, as God’s training-ground for us, 
He seems to regard as a vital part of our reconcilia¬ 
tion to God. As such it is tremendously important, 
both for our peace of mind and for our effectiveness. 

And, secondly, when this reconciliation with our 
experience is effected on Jesus’ lines, the result is not, 
as has been said, a stoical indifference to evil or 
passive sufferance of it. If we take the attitude 
of Jesus, we do not find ourselves inclined, as it 
were, to take evil lying down. On the contrary, 
we find ourselves in a position of new power over 
our circumstances. Having escaped from the 
captivity of our spirits, we often (though not always) 
discover that we can escape also from the captivity 
to circumstances which gave rise to our spiritual 
bondage. It is probably required of many people 
to-day that, watching patiently for opportunities, 
and then venturing largely on their faith in God, 
they should refuse to acquiesce in their circum¬ 
stances. They should have faith either to change 
the conditions of their work, or to change their work 
itself. Few people nowadays have a really effective 
choice of occupation in their youth, though possibly 
there should be many more who seriously question in 
adult life whether or not they should go on with it. 

It is not a mere counsel of perfection to say that 
unless we can serve God’s purposes in our jobs we 
should get out of them. In many situations we 
may not be able to work as well and serviceably as 
we might do if we could re-make the world of industry 
to-morrow, and yet find opportunities which it 


78 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

would be foolish or cowardly to abandon. We may 
know, if we will, whether or not we can continue in 
such situations with the sense of God’s personal 
commission to us to do so. And if we decide that 
we ought to continue where we are, though many 
things in our business life may still seem incongruous 
with the Spirit of Christ we may proceed with 
patience to eliminate them, and even make tem¬ 
porary concessions to circumstances without com¬ 
promising our inmost souls. If this be compromise, 
Jesus compromised with Roman Imperialism and 
the institution of slavery, in that He was content 
to work within the system of life which they 
established without directly attacking them, doing 
so surely because there were other knots in the 
social and moral life of the world which it was more 
urgent that He should cut or disentangle. But if 
this be not compromise, it leaves our spiritual 
energies unimpaired and our hearts whole to work 
by collective action, along both voluntary and 
political lines, to eliminate from industry evils 
which our isolated individual effort cannot touch. 
Thereby we may have the spiritual satisfaction of 
knowing that though our lives are given to work 
which is not ideal in all its features, we are all the 
time exerting ourselves to keep the boat-head of 
industry and commerce facing in the right direction, 
and ready to seize our opportunity for gaining here 
a foot and there a yard. 

We have now sketched briefly a conception of 
work related closely to the actual conditions of 
daily life, but yet shot through with the great life 
principles of Jesus. It offers to every man engaged 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF WORK 79 

in the world of business, a way of life in which 
Christ in all things sets the standard, and for which 
He also offers the motive power. If a man would 
set his hand to his work along these lines, he would 
not only be living what William James called “ a 
significant life,” however inconspicuous and sub¬ 
ordinate its place in the whole scheme of things, he 
might be living all the day in communion with 
Jesus in his work ; and his failures when they 
came, would only drive him back more resolutely 
upon Jesus again. The watchwords for such a life 
are the watchwords of good service, good workman¬ 
ship, and good fellowship. 

Along these lines lives busied with material pro¬ 
duction and bound to the wheel of organised special¬ 
isation, in shops and offices, would yet be charged 
with spiritual ideals, and directly fruitful in the 
service of the Kingdom of God. In detail the 
sketch may make mistakes and leave unanswered 
questions, but in broad outline it can hardly be 
questioned that here is a way of life which brings the 
appeal of Christ close home to the working life of 
the ordinary man. It calls him to repent, if in 
anything his life is devoted to useless purposes, if 
it is careless of quality, if it is mainly self-seeking, 
or if it is embittered by irritation or spite. It 
promises him increasing satisfaction in the develop¬ 
ment of his own personality for the service of others, 
and an increasing share in the transformation of 
the social machinery of the world through the 
magic talisman of goodwill—not indeed easily or 
without effort and failure, but assuredly and 
blessedly, on the honour of Jesus Christ. 


CHAPTER V 

THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEISURE 

If work needed a spiritual interpretation, much 
more so does leisure. Work has been treated by 
moralists at least with seriousness, though not 
always with spiritual sensitiveness ; but leisure is 
a no-man’s land in the world’s thinking. To many, 
leisure seems the sporting ground of all the devils 
that duty and religion have to fear. The great 
devils that destroy the moral foundations of life 
and the little devils that filch away its finer fruits— 
they are all supposed to find their opportunity when 
the day’s work is done. The arch-devils love the 
black darkness of midnight, but the little devils are 
all over us as soon as it is dark in winter and in 
summer long before the sun has set. And the little 
devils at least have been allowed their right of wav 
in the leisure hours of the world, because no one has 
claimed those hours for the fairies and the sprites. 
When religious people have made inroads upon 
leisure and claimed it for their uses, they have been 
apt to come with too heavy a tread and so drive 
away the fairies. They have not always recognised 
the spiritual value of high spirits and lighthearted¬ 
ness, and so have asked the world to make its 
leisure too laborious. They have come with an 
air too solemn, a philosophy too dark for the 

So 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEISURE 81 


occasions of festivity, and have sometimes un¬ 
wittingly disheartened the attempts of men to shake 
off the fetters which work so easily fastens upon 
men’s spirits. They have done so because they 
lacked a spiritual conception of the place of play in 
life. Not having a complete philosophy of leisure 
to offer, their philosophy of life has been prejudged 
by this defect and disregarded, and the world has 
gone on its way to enjoy its leisure according to its 
own unguided judgment—letting the little devils 
have their fling. 

I. The Obvious Uses of Leisure 

Some of the uses of leisure are, of course, well 
enough understood. No one questions the need of 
rest for minds which have been over-concentrated, 
and for bodies which have been over-strained. The 
value of physical exercise, relaxation, and change 
of occupation are not doubted. On the physical 
side, at least, we know where we are : the righteous, 
and even the over-righteous, join with the rest of 
the world in acclaiming these ends as necessary and 
right. So far, so good, but it does not take us far 
enough. It is not enough that our leisure hours 
should be occupied in re-equipping mind and body 
for their daily tasks. Leisure should be used for 
wider purposes—for ends less tightly tied to the 
wheels of work, and more delightful in themselves. 

In our present social order, leisure is particularly 
needed to provide compensation for the unsatis- 
tactoriness of working life, to ease faculties which 
have been cramped and give scope to tastes which 

G 


82 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

have been repressed in working hours. It is un¬ 
fortunately true, as we have said already, that 
working life does seriously cramp and starve the 
natures of very many. Modern industrial organisa¬ 
tion depends upon a degree of specialisation in work 
which uses up one set of the worker’s faculties at 
the expense of the rest. Our work is geared up to 
the driving wheels of competition and mass pro¬ 
duction. The pace is set for those who need to be 
kept at it, lest they grow slack, and the standard of 
work is set to the abilities of the less alert. Hence 
work, as we know it, tends to dull the mind, and 
blunt the taste, and fret the temper of those who are 
not spiritually forearmed against these deadening 
tendencies. We surely should not permanently 
acquiesce in the degree of restriction which working 
life now imposes on many, but meantime the restric¬ 
tion exists and we have to meet its evil consequences. 
Leisure should therefore make possible, by com¬ 
pensation, a right recovery of the balance of human 
nature so upset, and a right rebound from the 
compulsion and cramping narrowness of work. 
It should afford the opportunity for our giving free 
expression to that creative deeper 6elf which our 
working conditions have repressed. 

Hence the rebound of the majority, in their 
leisure, into activities which give rein to their 
desire for easy fellowship, excitement, colour, light, 
and gaiety. But for certain elements in the work- 
a-day environment of average people the rebound 
would probably be instinctively wise, since our 
natures know a good deal naturally of the best and 
quickest way to the restoration of their normal 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEISURE 83 

health. Under the provocation of office and factory 
routine human nature will, however, react some¬ 
times into forms of play which confirm rather than 
correct the evil bias given to it by work. The 
rebound may then result in corrupting or weakening 
excess. Naturally, a depraved taste may sometimes 
crave for the wrong food, in games as well as in 
victuals. Just as the victim of alcoholic habits 
craves for more alcohol, so do the victims of noisy 
factories and mind-deadening occupations crave 
for rowdyism and mental idleness in their play. 
But both the physical and the mental appetite can 
be persuaded to accept well-chosen alternatives. 
The worse the depravity, however, the better 
chosen must be the alternative—and in this matter 
of leisure we must, above all things, remember that 
play to be play must be pleasurable. It must not 
be too difficult, too much bound by rules, too much 
like work in its demands for patience and restraint, 
too much under authority and tutelage. If this 
be kept in mind the rebound which must come from 
the cramping conditions of working life may be 
so directed that it satisfies unsatisfied cravings, 
educates undeveloped faculties, and in every way 
enlarges human personality and increases the joy 
and energy of life. There are known games and 
enjoyments adapted to most needs, and the right 
kind of compensation may generally be found in 
pleasurable forms. 

Hence spring the need for guiding principles of 
play and the duty of religious people to understand 
and apply them. Some well-meaning folk are 
impatient because youth in general has too little 


84 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

taste for Bible-classes and improving lectures. They 
would be surprised if they were told that this is a 
pathological condition of mind needing rather to 
be humoured than to be scolded, and due in some 
cases to the working conditions they themselves 
have helped to impose upon youth. But thus it 
is, and therefore leisure must be filled, up to a 
point at least, with truly congenial and delightful 
play, appealing to the craving for light and colour, 
amusement and entertainment, and the easy give 
and take of irresponsible companionship. Forms of 
play can be devised which will satisfy all these 
initial requirements, and yet exercise the spirit 
in the right directions, and it is congenial to the 
happy spirit of Christ to devise them, and a primary 
duty of Christians to do so. But first we need to 
see what spiritual education and enrichment play 
is ideally capable of achieving. We pass, then, to 
consider some of the higher uses of leisure. 

II. The Higher Uses of Leisure 

Still keeping clearly in mind the idea that play 
must be pleasurable, it is possible to suggest that 
it may minister directly to many of the higher 
interests of the spirit. Especially should it be of 
use in stirring up the spiritual appetites which exist 
in human nature for the giving of pleasure, for 
seeing life as a whole, for wider knowledge, for the 
appreciation of beauty, for some kind of artistic 
self-expression, and for the enjoyment of good 
comradeship, I will speak of all these things in 
turn. 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEISURE 85 

I. Of the giving of pleasure there is no need to 
say very much. It is one of the disadvantages of 
modern methods of work that they make it so hard 
for the imagination to picture the uses to which 
work ministers. And this deprives the workers of 
one of the great incentives to effort, one of the 
great natural sources of spiritual nourishment. 
There is in every one a hunger of the spirit to 
render personal service to others, to see the pleasure 
it gives, and to reap the immediate reward of 
gratitude. In so far as this hunger is starved in 
work, it should be fed in play. The fun in all good 
games is the fun of the whole game shared by all, 
and not the fun which each gets out of his own 
performance. The sense of doing other people good 
is not in the foreground : but the joy of each 
depends none the less upon the joy of all, and it is 
the reaction between pleasure felt and pleasure 
given which raises the pitch of pleasure to its proper 
height. In young people, especially, the joy of 
service, perhaps more often than not, should take 
the form of pleasure shared among equals rather 
than help given to the needy. If we want to avoid 
self-consciousness in service, this is the form of 
service to encourage, as through sharing games it 
can be encouraged. The appeal of service most 
fitted to win an entrance into the heart of youth and 
capture a share of youth’s leisure for the expression 
of brotherhood is surely to be found just here. If 
it begins here lustily, it will not stop here ; for the 
giving of pleasure begets the desire to give still 
more, and in the end strengthens the will to give 
when the giving is not pleasant but rather costly. 


86 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

And we shall not make the mistake of divorcing the 
one kind of giving from the other. We do not of 
course suggest that the playing of games inevitably 
begets a generous and disinterested spirit. On 
the contrary, we bear it in mind that the desire 
to enjoy oneself has the other tendency also—the 
tendency to selfishness. We all know the tennis 
player who has no use for any opponent who cannot 
give him an equal game ; and we have heard of golf- 
widows and the like. The ideal of unselfishness 
needs therefore to be made explicit whenever ideals 
of play are presented. But this it is quite possible 
to do. Indeed, a large ideal of unselfishness might 
well be erected with play as the material it works 
in, and builds with. Why may we not translate 
the ideal of human brotherhood into terms of play ? 
Why not give youth as part of its religious ideal the 
aim of making good games universally possible in 
every rank of society ? Why not attempt to break 
down all social barriers by extending across them 
the fraternity of good sport ? It might be that the 
aim of obliterating all social barriers and sharing 
the freedom of the world of play with members of 
every rank of society would go a long way to give 
the idea of the Kingdom of God upon earth a hold 
upon youth’s imagination. Leagues of Nations to 
overthrow war, and brave endeavours to eliminate 
industrial strife are things for youth to dream about 
and manhood to achieve, but the expression of 
brotherhood in a League of Play—why should not 
youth set out to achieve it to-morrow ? Here is 
one facet at least of the Christian ideal of brother¬ 
hood, one part of the Christian use of leisure. 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEISURE 87 

2. It is sometimes doubted whether the spiritual 
hunger for knowledge and the desire to see life as a 
whole are universal or even general. Indeed, it is 
commonly supposed that the taste for “ education ” 
is a rare one, and those who most feel the praise¬ 
worthiness of learning most often despair of making 
it popular. And yet surely there is in most people 
so deep and urgent a need of seeing life in perspective 
that once it is met suitably, the need is confessed 
and clamant. Granted that it is not generally 
satisfied by schemes of education and systems of 
philosophy, nevertheless it exists, and its existence 
accounts for much of the aimlessness and restless¬ 
ness which drive many to sensationafism in their 
use of leisure. This need for a philosophy of life 
is proved by the emotional satisfaction which comes 
when it is found. Indeed, no human being can have 
peace of mind till he can see his life aims clearly 
envisaged and harmonised. We may grant that 
the taste for a logical scheme of life is not universal, 
and yet assert the existence of a real and genuine 
craving to see life as a whole—as a thing of parts 
and proportions, each having its values, and to¬ 
gether satisfying an instinctive demand for unity. 

Setting aside the desire for technical equipment 
for one’s job—which is not a leisure appetite at all, 
but only a tentacle stretched out from work to steal 
from leisure’s golden hours—the desire for know¬ 
ledge certainly is not popular. But then, how dull 
is the diet of knowledge usually offered, how little 
calculated to whet a jaded appetite ! The learned, 
and those who offer instruction, are apt to set too 
low a value upon facts and incidents, and much too 


88 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

high a value upon theories and systems of ideas. 
There are those whose nature is satisfied with that 
particular type of intellectual fare, but they are 
a minority. They are a most useful section of 
the community, for they have many of the innate 
capacities for leadership. Moreover, their needs 
are far too little regarded by the Churches’ bid for 
the leisure time of their adherents. For the sake 
of this minority there is need for systematic teaching 
of no low grade, covering a wide field of subjects, 
and showing how Christianity interprets and 
unifies the whole world of living beings.* But in 
the case of the majority, the hunger of the spirit 
for a philosophy of life must rather be met by a 
diet of separate stories and pictures and songs in 
which life’s values are shown in action and not 
described and correlated in cross-section. 

If, then, leisure is to minister widely to youth’s 
need for a true vision of life that makes its moral 
principles attractive and sets them all aglow, and 
if youth’s stagnant intellectual hunger is to be 
stirred to activity, adapted means of education 
must be found. The particular method of educa¬ 
tion which seems to offer the greatest hope of 
meeting the need of the moment is education 
which includes a right appeal to the dramatic 
sense. Along this line of approach it does seem 
possible to open up to many the all but closed 
world of music, literature, and art. Till they have 

* See on this subject the report, entitled Th» Church as a 
School of Christian Education. Price one shilling from the 
Young People’s Department of the Congregational Union, 
Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, E.C, 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEISURE 89 

seen life as an ideal, and as a whole, dramatically, 
the majority are hardly likely to want, or to be 
able to profit by, the intellectual presentation of 
its satisfying wholeness which appeals to the few. 

3. And here some other of the different purposes 
of leisure already named come into view. Among 
these is the use of leisure to satisfy the spirit’s demand 
for beauty , and provide it with some congenial form of 
spiritual self-expression . In the arts of drama and 
music, and to a lesser extent the arts of speech and 
song, we most of us can find our opportunity for 
spiritual self-expression and for beauty. In the 
chapter which follows I shall deal particularly with 
the spiritual appeal of beauty. Here I will only 
anticipate that treatment by suggesting that 
worship is hardly possible to those who do not 
exercise the aesthetic side of their personalities, 
whilst the pursuit of ideals is hardly possible to 
those who do not first make their ideals real to 
themselves in the realm of the imagination. We 
can only worship if we have learned to contemplate 
and admire. We can only live well when goodness 
and nobility have fired our souls. And if the 
practice of admiring goodness and discriminating 
between better and best is to be acquired, is there 
any more favourable medium for acquiring it than 
through a well-considered appeal to the dramatic 
sense ? All the arts have in them the possibility 
of educating the spirit, but the dramatic art has an 
advantage over the others in its power to combine 
them all. More will be said on this matter before 
the chapter closes, meantime, one other of the uses 
of leisure claims our notice. 


9 o WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

III. Comradeship in Leisure 

4. A final feature of the value of leisure to the 
life of the spirit is the opportunity which it affords 
for comradeship and for education in comradeship . 
As compared with work it brings us more into 
association with people of temperaments congenial 
to our own. We are thus enabled to learn, in an 
easier medium, to exercise our faculty for friendship. 
It is therefore important to work out the meaning 
md demands of fellowship in terms of play . Having 
laid it down as a principle that the acceptance of the 
Lordship of Christ means not the repudiation of 
play, or its fearfully guarded use, but the expression 
in real hilarity of the spirit of joy which Christ 
exemplified and enjoined, and having thus enlisted 
play as an ally, instead of alienating it as a rival, 
we may go on to lay down positive demands. 

Thus we can urge that those games should be 
cultivated which develop the team spirit, and the 
sporting attitude to difficult tasks and personal 
injuries,—not, for example, endorsing the Hindu 
boy essayist’s impression of football as a bad game, 
“ because if your opponent injures you in the game 
you cannot sue him at law ! ” W T e can insist that 
play should run into channels which will cause it, 
whilst remaining play, to minister to the joys of 
others. We can plead for those forms of recreation 
which taken together will minister to every side of 
our nature, including, for example, the intellectual 
and artistic sides. We can ask that youth will put 
its recreations under restraint when they tend to spoil 
the sport of others, as in fast motor cycling, and to 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEISURE 91 

forego altogether the forms of play which lead their 
friends into temptation, as certain forms of dancing 
tempt some to exhaust or over-stimulate themselves. 

In these ways we can make the spirit of play a 
handmaid to the spirit of human love and friend¬ 
ship. And if we do this we can show, on a large 
canvas and in bright colours that all comradeship, 
even the comradeship which is engendered in the 
byways of pleasure, is comradeship which can be 
governed by ideals of the spirit. Our friendships 
will always be second-rate and liable to corruption, 
unless they are friendships in the pursuit of things 
worth while in themselves; friendships indeed in 
the quest of ideals. Friendship in play thus comes 
to be an integral part of the Christian ideal of life 
so soon as we realise that there is in Christianity a 
spiritual ideal of hilarity and an obligation to find 
ever more and more satisfying expressions of beauty 
and joy. 

And when the spiritual basis of play has been 
thus affirmed we reach a conception of comradeship 
that makes it not difficult to forearm youth against 
the temptation to sacrifice the joys of the spirit to the 
joys of the flesh in the wonderfully alluring relations 
of sex. Let it be understood that all our instincts 
for sense delight are in themselves natural, pure, 
and capable of yielding divine beauty and satis¬ 
faction. But let it also be made clear as the 
condition of this that we remember always that we 
and our friends are spiritual persons with many- 
sided natures to satisfy, and eternity in which to 
find our complete fulfilment, so that we must not 
spoil the good gifts God has given us by carelessness 


92 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

of their proper use and limitation, or haste and 
greediness in seizing more than is right. The full 
fine flavour of joy is only possible to us if in our 
pleasures we remember always God and our fellows. 
If we do this our impulses for enjoyment will be 
directed into channels where each will have its best 
result, for they will have ceased to war with one 
another. 

Granted this ideal of leisure we may take the 
instincts of young people for play and comradeship 
as we find them, and train them to a Christian 
expression in organised social groups. And this 
we should do rather than set before them a picture 
of leisure, staidly and usefully employed, which 
we call Christian, and ask them to accept as part 
of the yoke of Christ. The Boy Scout and Girl 
Guide Movements illustrate the value of associating 
boys and girls in social units which live together a 
life of many-sided interest. This life may be made 
so attractive in its variety of common occupations 
that it is worth while for the individual to obey its 
rules and live for its honour, and so the first 
principles of self- 9 urrender to the larger social unit 
are acquired. The idea ought surely to be carried 
further by the formation of many other types 
of group, and especially those adapted to older 
adolescents and young men and women. The aim 
in each would be that common interests should lead 
to common forms of happy, natural, self-expression, 
tending always increasingly towards ideals of ser¬ 
vice ; though the companionship would not be 
founded exclusively upon these ideals. The move¬ 
ments already spoken of would seem to show that 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEISURE 93 

if you can associate boys and girls for the purpose 
of doing things which it is a pleasure to do, and 
keep uppermost all the time the idea that one must 
play the game with one’s fellows, the life of the 
group tends naturally to help its members to be 
their best at work and play. With older groups 
it should not be difficult to lead on to the idea of 
mutual responsibility in moral struggles—and teach 
that each must help his neighbours where he can. 
The Regnal League has shown how strong a 
comradeship can be based upon such loyalties as 
these. 

It is, of course, vital that all such groups should 
have their true psychological unity. In the late 
adolescent and junior adult periods of life, the 
make-believe, adventure interest, which forms the 
psychological basis of the Scout and Guide Move¬ 
ment, has to give way to something different. 
Perhaps the instinct for drama and dance is the key 
to the psychological basis for the social grouping 
of adolescence. Both these throw boys and girls 
together and so afford the opportunity for an 
education in a fellowship which is no longer the 
unisexual affair of earlier life. Here comes the 
opportunity to unfold ideals of fellowship in which 
the sense appeal of the physical is made the friend, 
and not, as it may otherwise become, the foe, of a 
bigger spiritual purpose. Fellowship in leisure is 
thus associated first with the more primitive un¬ 
moralised instincts for sense delight, and afterwards 
with the attempt to give delightful expression (as 
in drama) to developed moral ideals. From that it 
would be natural to lead on by stages to forms 


94 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

of social or political service adapted to maturer 
groups, or to some harder educational activity 
which they would take on for the sake of their 
further equipment and fuller intercourse, or to some 
sort of inter-class fellowship which would help 
to counteract the class isolation of working life. 
Provided the more elementary social instincts and 
constructive energies of the group have been 
enlisted first, this does not seem an unlikely or 
unnatural process. 

IV. Leisure and the Church 

If these things are true they bear closely on the 
work of the Church. If games and music, literature 
and the drama, no less than Bible-classes and prayer- 
meetings, can be made into the antechambers of 
religion, the whole handling of leisure by some 
Churches should undergo a change. In the main, 
it seems, the Churches have divorced intellectual 
culture from aesthetic culture, valuing the former 
as “ spiritual ” and deprecating the other as 
“ sensuous.” And while games and enjoyments 
have been encouraged in the Church’s programme, 
they have been valued chiefly for their indirect 
importance—as harmless occupations for those 
who might otherwise be worse employed ; or as a 
means of discharging surplus energies which might 
otherwise be hard to control; or even as baits to 
the unwilling, or coating for the religious pill. 
They have not been regarded as spiritual activities 
befitting the leisure of mankind in general and 
youth in particular, and so capable of providing the 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEISURE 95 

medium for a progressive education in the things 
of the spirit. 

But if, as we think, the natural form of spiritual 
expression, for youth especially, is in a many-sided 
comradeship in play, it is the Church’s business in 
some way or other to foster the comradeship of 
good play, regarding it as one of its most important 
points of contact with those not yet ready for all 
that it has to teach them. By psychological and 
spiritual necessity people make demands upon 
religion according to their experience of life, and 
since young people are in the main preoccupied 
with the light side of life, the demand they make 
upon religion is for enjoyment without alloy. 
Granted that the deepest things in religion only 
come home to the soul when it has tasted the bitter 
things in life, to demand such depth of the young is 
to ask them to be old before their time. Hence 
the one irreplaceable point of contact of the Church 
with youth is in the provision of facilities for the 
natural expression of their high spirits, their 
comradeship, and their love of beauty. 

Whether the Church can use these means of 
spiritual education and make them into real “ means 
of grace ” will depend upon its regarding these 
play activities as spiritual ends in themselves—• 
however partial and incomplete—and not mere 
means to other spiritual ends from which they 
are distinct in essence. The physical, social, and 
aesthetic activities of young people are to be regarded 
as an integral part, though not the whole, of their 
true spiritual expression. Since they are a part of 
the spiritual life, they should be claimed as suchj 



96 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

and since they are only a part they should not be 
isolated from the other, deeper, and fuller expres¬ 
sions of the spirit. And, for that to be the case, 
Christianity needs in some way to be recognised as 
the foster-mother of pure play. This means that 
Christian leaders should promote and guide the 
leisure activities of young people,—though whether 
provision should be made separately for each in¬ 
dividual Church, or group of Churches, or whether it 
should be for the community of youth in general may 
be an open question. But in cither case the leader¬ 
ship should be as far as possible in Christian hands, 
in order to ensure that ends which are partial shall be 
attained under the guidance of minds which see them 
in the true perspective of human life as a whole. 

Out of such true comradeship in the appropriate 
spiritual interests of youth, there should naturally 
spring (without any “ forcing ” and under steady 
but unobtrusive leadership) the desire for further 
self-fulfilment, and in particular for service and 
abandonment to the highest. And this natural 
awakening of deeper desires, whenever it may 
occur, will provide the true spiritual opportunity 
for an appeal for dedication to the fuller and more 
inclusive ideals of life. But such development will 
not be natural unless the leadership provided by the 
Church is of those who are as sensitive to the 
spiritual values of play as they are to those of 
service, work, and worship. A good response will 
be not only natural, but probable, if the leadership 
in leisure is thus supplied by those who are sensitive 
to spiritual values of all degrees. And when youth 
does awaken in this way to the wider and deeper 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEISURE 97 

purposes of life, and to the more strenuous tasks of 
the Church, its loyalty to them will be all the 
stronger as it reflects that the Church has all the 
time been guiding its life and comradeship along a 
true and satisfying line. 

The question of the precise relation of the 
Church as an institution to the recreative life of the 
community lies outside the province of this book. 
Some have proposed that it should be a part of the 
united evangelistic activity of the Churches to 
provide recreative clubs in sufficient variety and 
numbers to meet the needs of all. Others might 
wish to let the recreative life around them develop 
under non-religious auspices, trusting to the in¬ 
fluence of individuals inspired by the Churches to 
throw in their lot with it and use it as a means of 
moral and spiritual education. Others, again, will 
feel unable to attempt to influence more than the 
recreative life of their own immediate adherents. 
The matter is one for discussion and experiment. 
But in any case we must be prepared to allow great 
freedom to youth—to choose and direct its own 
course, and at the same time trust to the spiritual 
influence of those whose religion makes them good 
fellows, convinced sportsmen and genuine artists, 
to see that though many things are done which 
are inartistic and immature, an upward spiritual 
tendency is felt through the whole. Without 
attempting to settle this question of official relation¬ 
ship, I return in conclusion to examine in more 
detail the potentialities for spiritual education of a 
form of recreation already frequently referred to, 
namely the dramatic form. 


98 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

V. The Spiritual Potentialities of Drama 

The dramatic method has recently been gaining 
considerable prominence as a means of general 
education. This point, among others, is of interest 
to us, but it is not our chief point. It is with the 
drama as a means of expressing the Christian spirit 
and ideal and of illustrating the beauty of the 
Christian motive and practice, and thus of stimu¬ 
lating the Christian will and emotions that we are 
specially concerned. In other words, we approach 
the subject from the standpoint of the Christian 
Gospel, and not merely from the standpoint of 
moral culture. 

Of the value of the dramatic method for kindling 
imagination and arousing emotion, we need say 
little. Educators are suggesting that in some form 
or other it is the supreme method for presenting 
moral ideas, and that it is only by associating 
literature and music and the arts of representation 
with big moral ideas that you can fire the minds 
of boys and girls with enthusiasm for goodness, 
truth, and beauty. This point of view is argued 
with good effect by Dr. Hayward and Arnold 
Freeman in The Spiritual Foundations of Recon¬ 
struction. This book contains examples of the w~ay 
in which the principle may be applied in schools to 
the dramatic presentation of the achievements of 
great ideals. Thus, for example, Democracy, The 
League of Nations, Shakespeare, and the Apostle 
Paul, are successively made the subject of these 
“ Celebrations,” as they are called. More of these 
examples are given in Dr. Hayward’s volume of 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEISURE 99 

School Celebrations , whilst the more general applica¬ 
tion of the same ideas is made in Arnold Freeman’s 
Education through Settlements. 

These writers argue that the establishment of 
such new celebrations as Empire Day (1907), St. 
David’s Day (1915), Shakespeare Day (1916), marks 
not only a new departure in education, but is an 
admission that the ideas with which these celebra¬ 
tions are concerned were not in fact being taught 
effectively in Scripture lessons, or by other forms of 
class instruction. The same failure is implied in 
the demand that is made by various societies for 
special teaching to be given regarding, for example, 
temperance, gambling, thrift, peace, eugenics, kind¬ 
ness to animals, etc. The writers, indeed, affirm 
that the right attitude to such subjects cannot be 
taught by the ordinary school methods. It is not 
so much to be learned as imbibed. What is needful, 
and what is aimed at in their proposal, is that great 
moral ideas should not be “ mere ideas,” cold, 
verbal, and isolated, but that they should come into 
the mind with a certain momentum or background, 
with a certain massiveness and atmosphere. They 
ask, therefore, that the class teaching of the Bible, 
of literature, of music, history, and certain other 
subjects, should be largely abolished in favour of a 
liturgical, ceremonial, or celebrational treatment, 
which they hold to be more emotionally effective than 
mere instruction. Incidentally they hold that “ great 
art ” would bridge the gap between the traditional 
and ineffective methods of the Church when it in¬ 
vades the School with its religious instruction, and 
the bare and unimpressive proposals of the secularist. 


100 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

Dramatic work calls for consideration first 
because of its value to the performers. For them 
it is an exercise in memory work, in promptitude, 
in accurate observation, in self-subordination to a 
purpose, in good team work. This in itself is a 
good deal. There is also training in the power to 
put oneself in another’s place, and see things from 
another’s point of view ; and since identification is 
essential to true sympathy with others, drama may 
thus have a big contribution to make to religious 
training. Bat there is still more than that. There 
is aesthetic as well as moral training—the training 
in the beauty of the fitting phrase or gesture, the 
telling costume, or general scenic effect; the training 
in appreciation of emotional emphasis and restraint. 
Emerson has declared that when the aesthetic sense 
is debased, the moral sense is usually debased also, 
and William McDougall also in his Social Psychology 
asserts that the aesthetic appreciation of fine 
character is a necessary part of its appeal. If 
these things are so, it would seem that the religious 
sense of many has been cut from some of its roots 
by their lack of aesthetic education. 

Moreover, a good play should have the same 
value for intelligent and attentive spectators on 
the one hand as for efficient and conscientious per¬ 
formers on the other. The performers are con¬ 
sciously, corporately, and actively striving to bring 
out the meaning of the play. The spectators are 
endeavouring to appreciate, though more passively, 
that same central idea, and emotionally to share in 
it ; and thus players and spectators are united in a 
fellowship of thought and emotion. Christianity 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEISURE ioi 


lends itself to such dramatic treatment since it 
appeared as a life lived before it became a set of 
ideas preached. It is a way of life—the incarnation 
of a divine spirit. It is, therefore, in its very quality 
dramatic, and can only be adequately expressed in 
the action of life, that is drama. It is best recom¬ 
mended by being shown and seen. Undoubtedly, if 
an idea can be expressed in dramatic form it will 
both secure a much bigger audience and make a 
much deeper impression than if it is presented in 
abstract terms in lecture, book, or sermon. The 
question is how far the specific Christian message 
can be presented dramatically. Would it be 
possible, for example, to hold a dramatic evangel¬ 
istic mission ? If it would, it would incidentally 
enable at least twice as many people as now 
to take part in public evangelism. We have Ober- 
ammergau and the Bethlehem Tableaux to suggest 
possibilities. 

In the Middle Ages, plays were written by 
priests and acted by their flock in their Churches. 
The drama was a normal and recognised vehicle of 
Christian teaching and culture. It was used to 
illustrate Christian character—to show sins and 
virtues in action and consequence both in this 
world and the next. The dramatists at length 
resented the limitations imposed on their art by 
the narrow range of subjects provided by the 
Church and the Bible, and interested themselves 
with the wider range provided by the common life 
about them and the historical records to which 
they had recourse. The breakaway from ecclesi¬ 
astical control was all to the good, but that is no 


io2 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

reason why drama should not return to those 
themes which once it portrayed so effectively to the 
uneducated population of Tudor and Elizabethan 
England. At the same time there are plenty of 
modern plays which have made a success in the 
ordinary theatre to prove to us the possibility of 
expressing high ideals and Christian motives through 
the drama without its being fettered to the older 
themes. 

One great objection to the whole procedure is, 
of course, the traditional and still, in some circles, 
fairly widespread prejudice among the older folk 
who carry on the work of the Church against 
dramatic activity of every kind. They fear that 
we may simply encourage interest in a side of life 
which usually tends to frivolity or worse, because 
its associations are bad and its development un-ideal. 
There are, however, some who think that the alleged 
prejudice against the drama in the Churches is 
exaggerated, and that the suspicion of the old- 
fashioned would soon be dispelled by the production 
of a few artistic Christian plays. Meantime, all 
over the country, churches are going in for dramatic 
art, though, unfortunately, for want of guiding 
principles, most of them are doing silly farces, 
vulgar and poor in every way. Nor is the trouble 
confined to this country alone; only this week 
there comes to my hand a cry of distress from a 
Christian community in Madagascar embarrassed 
by the dramatic propensities of its young people, 
and without a clue to their wise direction. Even 
where the dramatic method is held to be good in 
itself, the suspicion lingers that it may not be right 


CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEISURE 103 

to use it for the expression of the best and deepest 
things in life. This perhaps points to a special 
development of the dramatic method for Church 
purposes, and it may be that Pageantry and the 
“ Celebrations ” already referred to show the way 
to this. In the Celebrations, music, painting, 
literature, recitation, and song are all made use of ; 
but very little action is employed. Such adapta¬ 
tions of the drama may prove, if not the goal of 
Christian dramatics, a useful half-way house. 

The chief difficulty felt at the moment by those 
who take a positive view of the spiritual possi¬ 
bilities of the drama, is the dearth of plays that 
are suitable. There is not much that is at the 
same time good enough and simple enough for 
amateur performers. The Adult School Movement, 
30, Bloomsbury Street, W.C., publishes a setting of 
Tolstoy’s Where Love is , God is. There are a number 
of missionary plays and some mediaeval mystery 
plays available, but there are those who think that 
it would be a pity to cramp a modern Christian 
drama with ancient conventionalities, that the 
Church has already suffered too much from the 
tyranny of mediaevalism, and that there is no need 
to revert to the crudeness of the miracle and 
morality plays for our material, the modern theatre 
having already presented us with a more suitable 
instrument for the purposes of a Christian dramatic 
art, in the work of modern serious dramatists ]ike 
Jerome and Drinkwater, Galsworthy and Bernard 
Shaw. Of this material Drinkwater’s Cromwell and 
Lincoln are highly praised by those who have used 
them for Church purposes, but there are proprietary 


io 4 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

rights which may not be infringed. The adaptation 
of some standard novels is also suggested, and The 
Passing of the Third Floor Back may possibly be 
commended in spite of its sentimentality and 
obtrusive preachiness. From the point of view of 
evangelism, the most urgent need is for plays that 
will present the great Christian ideals and demands. 
Galsworthy, it is thought, leaves out “ Redemp¬ 
tion.’’ Shaw leaves out “ The Cross.” Drink- 
water comes nearest, but he leaves out the Church ! 
These men can write plays that preach on “ The 
wages of sin is death,” or “ Be sure your sin will 
find you out,” but something is wanted that will 
grip the soul where they leave off. Mediaeval 
mystery plays are not satisfactory for this purpose, 
for they leave a sense of unreality that only confirms 
indecision; and plays in which Bible narratives are 
presented have, as a rule, a similar defect. We 
still await the production of plays which embody 
the full gospel appeal. 

We have, meantime, a little testimony to the 
revolutionary spiritual effect of such plays as we 
have, and it is probable that much more could be 
gathered. There can be little doubt that thousands 
of young people in this country owe their interest 
in the missionary enterprise primarily to their part 
in some dramatic representation. The study of 
the life and character of Livingstone by those who 
were asked to personate him has, for example, 
marked a spiritual crisis in more lives than one, 
and the same may be said of the dramatic repre¬ 
sentation of the story of The Mayflower . In many 
instances some piece of service rendered in such 



CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LEISURE 105 

dramatic performances has been the first intro¬ 
duction to the wider service of the Church. The 
work of the Guild of Missionary Players and similar 
bodies has in like manner done much to arouse the 
interest of still larger bodies of spectators.* In the 
view of those who have watched this matter most 
closely, the method could be applied more widely 
and for the most direct and personal of religious 
appeals. The method which has been found so 
useful in generating interest in foreign missions 
and church history, might also be used in wise 
hands, as an evangelistic means of winning men 
to a personal faith in the Gospel of Christ, f 


* Information about Missionary Plays can be obtained from 
the Missionary Societies’ Headquarters; whilst information of a 
more general kind might be sought from The Educational Settle¬ 
ments Association, 30, Bloomsbury Street, W.C. 

t The St. Martin’s Players, of St. Martin’s Church, Trafalgar 
Square, haYe produced, I am told, a Pageant of the Spirit of 
Christ, 


CHAPTER VI 


BEAUTY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

In the sketch just given of the Christian conception 
of life, we have had to keep always in view three 
quite distinct, though closely interw r oven, sets 
of relationships. Whether it be in Work or in 
Leisure, the Christian has to perfect his relations 
with God, with his fellows, and with the material 
world. The Christian religion is peculiar among 
all religions in the close connection it maintains 
between the first and second groups of these 
relations : to love God and not love our neighbour 
is for Christianity unthinkable ; to show love to 
our neighbour is, says Jesus, to show love to Him. 
That is a Christian commonplace no one denies ; 
and though few do justice to it, elaboration of the 
point would serve no useful purpose. It is merely 
necessary to reaffirm it before passing on to another 
point, complementary to this, and not to be taken 
as diminishing its importance, viz., the connection 
between our relations with God and our relations 
with the material world. This, too, is of primary 
importance, whether for work or leisure, and our 
neglect of it may account for a good deal of our 
failure to perfect our other relations with God and 
man. 

106 


BEAUTY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 107 

The average Christian who takes his religion 
seriously is apt to have not very much religious 
enthusiasm for perfecting the relations of his 
business life. He may take these relations quite 
“ religiously ” as we say, meaning painstakingly, 
and may try to fulfil them honourably; but his 
pulse does not beat high with the thought of what 
he may be able to accomplish for Christ in that 
sphere. Whilst he will be ardent about the success 
of his favourite missionary society, or the progress 
of his Church, or the response of his Sunday 
scholars to his teaching, his thoughts are cold and 
grey when they turn to business. Though there 
may be countless exceptions, this is probably the 
rule. But why is this ? Is it not because in 
business the Christian thinks he is in a world of 
material values, and it is only the spiritual values 
which are really interesting ? He does not really 
think you can sell tea or cotton to the glory of God. 

So, too, the average Christian who is earnest 
and self-sacrificing may enjoy good music and fine 
pictures, but he has doubts whether, for instance, his 
enjoyment of good music ranks equal in spirituality 
with his enjoyment of, say, good sermons. The 
art and play side of life are necessary to the 
weakness of mortal flesh, which cannot sustain a 
high note for long at a time. They refresh the 
body and the brain, but they are more likely to 
entangle the spirit than to edify it. Many may 
think this statement grossly exaggerated, and yet 
they will probably find that enjoyment and religion 
stand in the minds of the vast multitude of their 
fellow countrymen as either opposed or indifferent 


108 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

to one another ; and that the typical attitude of the 
spokesmen of religion to such things as artists and 
theatres is well calculated to create this popular 
impression. Spirit and matter are conceived as 
being normally at war. 

To me it is simply unthinkable that industry will 
be dominated by the Spirit of Christ until Christian 
people come to believe that the handling of material 
things is meant to be sacramental—everywhere and 
always—and that in every action and transaction 
in commerce and manufacture, just as in every jest 
and every sport, whilst there is a way of doing the 
thing that is just soporific to the spirit, and a way 
that may be actually poisonous, there is certainly 
a way that is strictly and literally to the glory of 
God. Nor is it credible that our social life will 
become friendly till social employments and enjoy¬ 
ments are all valued as spiritual ends in themselves. 
“ Whether you eat or whether you drink,” says the 
Apostle, “ or whatsoever you do, in word or deed, 
do all to the glory of God.” And, if you please, 
the glory of God is not to be manifested simply by a 
wise moderation in eating and drinking, but by a 
true appreciation. God’s glory is to be found in 
good victuals, not only because they are useful, but 
because they are delightful. God’s bounty is 
declared in the enjoyment which He has added to 
what might otherwise be the tedious occupation 
of bodily nourishment. Some one once expressed 
surprise to the poet Tennyson on witnessing his 
delight in a meal of roast beef and boiled potatoes. 
“ All fine-natured men,” was his reply, “ know 
what is good to eat.” 


BEAUTY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 109 

The truth is that the life of the senses is either 
sacramental or it is sensual, and if it is sensual, it 
is not simply indifferent from the point of view of 
religion, but positively degrading. Unless we dis¬ 
cern the glory of God in eating and drinking, in 
working and playing, we eat and drink damnation 
to ourselves. We work and play ourselves into the 
hands of the Devil, we become the bondservants 
of sordid and cloying sense. And men do this 
daily, in offices and factories, and in theatres and 
music halls, while all the time they might in the 
same places, and in much the same occupations, be 
scaling the ascent of heaven. 

I. The Eternal Significance of Beauty 

How closely intertwined are the spiritual and 
the material we may see if we consider the imagery 
which religion employs. Christ is the Bread of 
Life. The Church is His Body. The Spirit comes 
to man as water to wash away his sins, fire to burn 
up his dross, and flame to light his candle. Much 
also of the language of religion is the language of 
love, which again is a language based upon physical 
attractions and emotions, within which the things 
of the spirit are discerned. It is not without 
significance that the Church has been able to use 
for its own adoration of Christ some of the sensuous 
imagery of Solomon’s Song of Love. What is all 
this but the recognition that all men’s 6ense ex¬ 
periences are full of suggestions of an inner meaning. 
Whilst he savours them with his physical senses, 
his spirit is fed also with some feast of meaning 


no WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

which transcends the world of sense. The purpose 
of life is to discern these spiritual values in the 
material world, and in the end to lay hold of them 
so firmly that they are known and remembered 
when their sense origin has been forgotten. Once 
stored in memory they can be recaptured without 
the original sense stimulus ; but the fact tnat they 
all have their roots in the material world should 
never be forgotten. 

Now what there is in things which gives them 
this higher value, it is difficult to tell. But it is no 
less certain that there is in scents and scenes and 
sounds some witchery that sets the spirit afire. 
Training is needed to perceive these finer meanings, 
and discipline and repose are needed to appreciate 
them ; just as restraint and insight are needed by 
the artist or musician who produces them. The 
name we have for this quality of spiritual appeal is 
beauty ; but what beauty is no man can say* It 
is a sort of overplus in the value of things, an over¬ 
tone in the music of life, which transports the 
spirit out of itself, and out of its immediate surround¬ 
ings. It is the up-welling of the joy which inheres 
in all the created works of God and the awakening 
of a kindred joy in those who appreciate them. 
The ultimate attitude of the spirit to beauty is 
therefore one of self-forgetting worship. This self- 
forgetfulness is as much as to say “ Here is some¬ 
thing for which it is worth while letting oneself go, 
and losing oneself. Here is something that is 
absolutely worth while.” And after all that is very 
much akin to what the spirit says when it is 
made aware of the presence of God ; for just as the 


BEAUTY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT m 


vision of God will heighten a man’s sense of 
natural beauty, so the sense of beauty will make 
him sensitive to the call of God for his spirit’s 
devotion. 

How near these things lie together is illustrated 
again by our use of the word “ grace.” When a man’s 
physical bearing or his moral behaviour reaches a 
certain degree of finish, of charm, of beauty ; we 
speak of their grace. Now, grace is the word which 
we attach pre-eminently to that quality of the life 
of Jesus which makes us long to be like Him, and it 
is also the word we use to express that overflowing 
bounty of God which produces in man incalculable 
inflows of spiritual life. We have but to awake to 
the beauty of things, and to believe that life is 
meant for the discovery and reproduction of beauty, 
because God is like that, and from every corner of 
the world where beauty lurks, spiritual life and 
energy come flooding in to our souls. 

“ If any man would compel you to go with him 
one mile, go with him twain,” said Jesus, in one of 
those packed sentences into which He compressed 
a whole philosophy of life and religion. In other 
words, live for the overplus, the overflow, the 
superfluous. Pay twenty shillings in the pound, 
says morality, and you shall be a respected citizen of 
this world. To enter the Kingdom of Heaven, says 
religion, you must abandon this worldly arithmetic 
and give back always something more than you are 
asked or paid for ; and that overplus will somehow 
be in the coinage of beauty. There is no joy in 
the morality of the market-place, no joy in exchange 
which does not over-pay both sides, no joy in making 



112 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

things merely to serve their mundane purpose. 
Joy comes when a finer finish, an added touch of 
warmth or colour is given to our speakings or to 
our doings—for the sake of love and beauty. 

What a great deal of meaning also is packed into 
that story of the alabaster box of ointment which a 
woman took and broke over Jesus’ feet! Why this 
waste, said the disciples, considering how it might 
have been used for the relief of the poor ? It was 
Judas who said this in the narrative, because he 
kept the bag and was a thief ; but there have been 
many another since who was not a Judas, whom 
the incident has puzzled. Why this expenditure 
on cathedrals and organs and flowers when there 
is lack of bread for the poor to eat ? The answer 
that man does not live by bread alone is meant to 
dethrone all merely utilitarian argument. There 
is a certain point at which luxuries become more im¬ 
portant than necessities : what is then wanted more 
than physical nourishment is some sort of spiritual 
enravishment. Life needs its full supply of the 
experiences which make its senses thrill : and youth 
needs them in abundance. As Clutton-Brock 
has urged,* one reason why the sex romance of 
adolescence exerts such an overwhelming power 
over the youth of this country is that it is the 
only romance they know. Their experience 
of the linking of spirit and sense in acts of 
romantic abandonment is confined to this one 
instance, whereas their lives should be full of the 
rapturous spiritual enjoyment of the things of 
sense. 


* In The Ultimate Belief. 


BEAUTY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 113 

Just how the immediate experience of beauty in 
Nature and Art is related to the conscious personal 
experience of God is not easy to define, it is sig¬ 
nificant that the experience of God cannot entirely 
express itself till it has made use of beauty. It 
needs beauty of phrase and tone to convey it to 
others. Prayer tends naturally towards poetic 
expression ; it seems not only to demand richness 
of phrase, but also to create its own rhythms. It is 
not only the Anglican priest who intones the 
prayers he uses in the congregation ; in the Free 
Church prayer-meeting the extempore prayer of the 
uneducated layman often becomes a kind of 
rhythmic chant. Strike out all the poetry and the 
melody which religion has created for its service, 
forbid the impassioned rhetoric of the preacher, or 
the pregnant symbolism of the religious rite, and 
should we not make our denuded testimony im¬ 
potent and false ? It is hard, indeed, to convey 
our meaning to those to whom we speak of God 
unless they have authentic experiences whereby to 
interpret the only language in which God can be 
adequately described—the language of beauty. 

The experience of beauty is thus at least an 
avenue to the experience of God, and an outcome 
of it : is it that experience itself ? Surely it is an 
experience of God Himself. It is an apprehension 
of the spiritual goodness which lies behind and 
inter-penetrates the material world. Granted that 
the beauty we acclaim is really beautiful, the 
recognition of its beauty is as much a discernment 
of God as is the recognition of, say, a noble act that 
has its source in Him* 


l 


114 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

It is God’s glory that is revealed to us whenever 
we find in any action or any experience something 
so good that it sends our spirits soaring. Whether 
it be the blue of a gentian, or the sound of a breeze, 
or the passing of light over a cornfield, or a lithe 
human figure, or a clean stroke in tennis, a gracious 
salutation, or an heroic act—if it carries us out of 
ourselves in wonder, or gratitude, or the desire to 
share our joy, we have heard God’s voice. All 
beauty has indeed its source in Him, just as truth 
and goodness have. They are distinct and com¬ 
plementary revelations of the one perfection, so 
that if we recognise any of these things for what it 
is. we are at least entering upon an experience of 
God. 

How full and satisfying such an experience will 
be must always depend upon the degree to which 
the spirit has made itself familiar with God in other 
experiences. To know God is more than to have 
a few isolated experiences of Him. To know God 
is to have a whole network of experiences through 
each of wdiich some knowledge of Him has been 
borne in upon the spirit through the senses, and 
whose occurrence has made us aware of a Reality, a 
Presence, a Person from whom they come. Till 
we have learnt to ascribe some element in all our 
experiences to a Father, we can hardly be said to 
know God as Christians in any of them. And 
w f hcn we have found God present in that way in 
life, no isolated experience of His works w r ill satisfy 
us unless we can consciously recognise Him in and 
through it. 

There are, indeed, some who are at present 


BEAUTY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 115 

sensitive only to truth, or to beauty, or to moral 
right, and their character tends to be cold or dreamy 
or hard accordingly. There may be some who will 
never be sensitive to the beauty of nature till their 
aesthetic sense has been aroused by such a moral 
experience as the experience of forgiveness. There 
are some, again, who are sensitive to a divine appeal 
in beauty who yet have not related this voice of 
the divine to the voice of God they hear in conscience 
—and their natures are distracted and enfeebled 
because it is so. And there are others who have 
felt the experience of nature’s beauty as a positive 
pain because of their lack of faith in the goodness 
of God’s purpose for mankind. They have no 
vision of beauty in the divine ordering of human 
life, no glimpse of the satisfying perfection of the 
social purpose of God, and hence their experience 
of beauty is as the sound of a voice that mocks the 
passion of desire which it arouses in their souls. 
To them the experience of beauty is not as yet 
the experience of finding God : but maybe it is 
part of the experience of God seeking them ; the 
foretaste of an experience of a God who is truly 
amazing and wonderful, but still terrible because 
still untrusted and unknown. The experience of 
beauty as an experience of God is only fully 
possible to those who in some way or other have 
experienced “ the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.” 
Hence, and in spite of all Christian PhiJistines, the 
tremendous stimulus which Christianity has given 
in history to the appreciation of nature and to 
every form of art. 


ii6 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

II. The Present Neglect of Beauty 

At the present day, however, beauty is at a 
discount in the world, and morality and religion 
are both impoverished in consequence. Whereas 
the aim and sum of all morality should be to bring 
mankind to appreciate and to share whatever in 
life is in any sense lovely, morality has usually 
concerned itself exclusively with that which is 
narrowly useful. Thereby it is given two un¬ 
related functions, one being to supply the material 
necessities of the world, and the other to minister 
to its moral health. Thus the moralist divorced 
from the artist loses sight of the middle section of 
human duty which should unite the two, the 
ministry to the world’s hunger for pure enjoyment 
and delight. Now, when this supremely important 
segment of life is forgotten, religion is reduced to a 
hard utilitarian morality. It is so at the present 
day, when the idea of religion is far too frequently 
associated with the horsehair and oatmeal porridge 
idea of morality, and consequently is rejected. 
Indeed, most men have actually come to think that 
it is frivolous and idle to spend more time in com¬ 
munion with God than is strictly necessary to keep 
them in the paths of virtue. We think that we 
must put so much energy into being good that in 
this wicked world we have none to spare for being 
merely religious. From this delusion we need to 
be delivered by a refreshment of our sense of 
aesthetic values. We must practise art for its 
own sake and play for the sheer joy of it, or we 
shall lose our sense of the right of religion to 


BEAUTY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 117 

be cultivated except for its moral utility, and 
refuse to practise communion with God unless 
morally it pays. 

I have already suggested that no unqualified 
certificate of religious approval can be given to 
everything which claims to be artistic. It is possible 
to mistake the grotesque for the beautiful and 
appreciate that which we ought rather to spurn. 
There are true and false values in aesthetic feeling. 
There are aesthetic experiences which are in them¬ 
selves essentially diabolical, disintegrating to person¬ 
ality, destructive of the soul. They interpret and 
rejoice in that which is essentially sinister and evil. 
They apprehend, express, and communicate not 
the good which is at the heart of reality, but the 
evil which is bound up with it in this mixed stage 
of being through which our souls pass for their 
education. And that means that Christian educa¬ 
tion in aesthetic values is of supreme importance. 
As we judge aesthetic values, so we are likely to 
judge moral and spiritual values. There is a curious 
parallelism between the spheres of goodness, truth, 
and beauty, so that although they are distinct and 
separate spheres there is a sort of congruity between 
what is good and bad in each. The same terms 
can thus be used in criticism of a picture, a song, 
a book, a religion, a character. And it is certainly 
true that if we tolerate ugliness or lack of discipline, 
coarseness, heaviness, or self-indulgence in art and 
play, these will recur in religion and conduct. If 
we are content with what is cheap and pretty and 
easy in art, we shall be content with what is super¬ 
ficial and taking in conduct. If we are content 


118 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

with what is merely sugary in music we shall incline 
to the sentimental in religion.* 

Another conclusion may now be added to those 
already set down regarding the Christian con¬ 
ception of work.f Carrying the idea of the duty of 
good workmanship only a point further we may 
now say that all work should aim not only at finish 
and distinction, but ultimately at some real beauty. 
It is not worthy of men and women to whom God 
has given the capacity for creating and enjoying 
beauty that it should be so little exercised in their 
work and in their working surroundings. It is not 
realised how seriously the neglect of beauty starves 
the spiritual nature of man, reacts unfavourably 
upon his morality, and drains away his energy. 
Particularly to-day, when so much human power 
is put into manufacture, the importance of beauty 
needs emphasis. The cult of utility at the expense 
of beauty is a direct blow at the ideal and spiritual 
interests in life. It is a dangerous denial of the 
spiritual purpose of the material world. It rele¬ 
gates the spiritual too much to leisure time, making 
it an extra, and probably a luxury. It is therefore 
needful that we do something to recover our 
standards of beauty in the production of articles 
of use of every kind—clothes, houses, furniture, 
streets, and public buildings ; everything indeed on 

* This is the motive behind the present-day attempt to reform 
Church music and, especially, hymn music. The Church Music 
Society and many prominent musicians are identified with it, and 
the new standards can be discerned in such productions as The 
English Church Hymnal , In Hoc Signo, etc., while the hymn¬ 
singing festivals conducted in various places are attempting to 
popularise the movement. 

t In Chapter IV. 


BEAUTY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 119 

which our minds tend to rest. By beauty we do 
not, of course, mean mere prettiness, still less mere 
ornament. Decorative effects are often gained at 
the expense of beauty, and there is beauty often 
enough in things which are severely plain : the 
absolutely fitting thing is of itself beautiful. But 
beauty must be sought sometimes for its own sake, 
and not obtained always and only as a by-product. 

We have, therefore, deliberately to fight the 
ugliness and the racket and clamour of much of the 
working life of to-day, on the ground that God loves 
quiet and beauty. And because God loves finish 
and delicacy in work, we must try to achieve these 
qualities in our individual efforts and make their 
pursuit more possible in the collective life of industry 
and commerce, to the utmost of our power. If it 
is indeed true that we may “ experience ” God in 
the experience of beauty and the joy of successfully 
beautiful achievement, then as religious people we 
are bound to do so, and to make it possible for 
others to do so wherever we can. The thought of 
what we may thereby achieve is brought out in 
less prosaic language in the following poem by 
John Drinkwater :— 


If all the carts were painted gay 
And all the streets swept clean. 
And all the children came to play 
By hollyhocks, with green 
Grasses to grow between; 

If all the houses looked as though 
Some heart were in their stones, 
If all the people that we know 
Were dressed in scarlet gowns. 
With feathers in their crowns; 


izo WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

I think this gaiety would make 
A spiritual land, 

I think that holiness would take 
This laughter by the hand, 

Till both should understand. 

We grant fully, however, the extreme difficulty 
of realising any high standard of beauty in the 
modern world of manufacture and business— 
demoralised as it is both ethically and aesthetically, 
because it is keyed up too hard to the note of 
utility. Hence the enormous importance of using 
play for the establishment of right scales of aesthetic 
value, so as to make the taste for beauty pure and 
strong enough to tell. In some amusements we 
may find an appeal to self-indulgence and selfishness, 
and an expression of the spirit of vanity and 
derision of all that is good that are nothing short of 
diabolical. While others will embody and express 
a spirit of hilarity wholly attuned to the clear and 
happy harmonies of the Gospel. A lesson of the 
greatest importance in morals and religion may 
be taught when boys and girls are given the 
opportunity to experience the latter. To give such 
opportunities to-day is a magnificent service, both 
because of the ardour and energy which the youth 
of to-day has available for its games, and because 
of the great variety of good games and fine shows 
now available. 

In gauging the importance of this matter, we 
are bound to remember how little scope the living 
conditions of so many give them either for the 
enjoyment of beauty or for the creation of it. 
As we have said already, throughout the vigorous 
hours of the best of their days, a great many people 


BEAUTY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 


121 


are making things which are significant of no 
generous thought or beautiful emotion. They go 
home to surroundings which speak of little or no 
divine loveliness, either inside their homes or 
outside them. Despite the morally and spiritually 
depressing tendencies of these occupations and 
surroundings, they do indeed manage to preserve 
and cultivate much beauty of feeling and action 
in their dealings with each other, and in their 
devotion to God ; but how much more exuberant 
and lavish would be their exercise of virtue, how 
much more completely attuned to goodness would 
be their spirits, if they could but enter more fully 
and deeply into the true experiences of worth and 
goodness in their play! 

At the present day there is in the world so great 
a craving for beauty that not to satisfy it would be 
to do an almost irreparable injury to the spiritual 
life of the world. Particularly are the young 
seized and shaken by it. Experienced teachers tell 
how great a change has come over their pupils in 
this respect within a couple of decades. It may be 
that it is in this direction particularly that the 
modern spirit is hungry for God : and if this be 
so, beauty must be one of the serious pursuits of 
the present age, or religion will wither away. For 
the world to-day, it is strictly and soberly speaking 
a choice between the pursuit of beauty and the 
decay of religion, a choice between Art and Atheism. 
We must learn better to attend to the marvels 
which God is daily showing in the fields and in the 
sky, and to the beauty He has printed on the faces 
and on the deeds of men, or we shall miss some part 


I 2 Z WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

of the essential evidence of His Presence in our 
life, and deny ourselves some sources of peace and 
strength and gladness upon which we might other¬ 
wise be drawing to meet the strain and fret of our 
days. Equally, too, must we learn to emulate our 
God in the production and multiplication of beauty, 
or we shall not sufficiently realise what loveliness 
is and what it costs to produce—and lacking that 
essential knowledge shall not be quick to discern 
how desirable and how worshipful is the grace of 
our Lord Jesus Christ, in His life and death and in 
His calling to us to follow Him. 


CHAPTER VII 

RELIGIOUS DECISION AND RELIGIOUS GROWTH 

I. The Rudiments of the Religious Spirit 

And now let us see what conclusions our argument 
will carry. We have been picturing the spiritual life 
not as a life whose ideal was to edge away as far as 
possible from the toil and the reward of material 
activity, but one whose ideal was to wrest its 
spiritual treasures from these very things. The 
essence of the Christian life is not its mental conver¬ 
sations with God in retirement, but its personal 
co-operation with God in everyday action. Our 
highest moments of spiritual meditation will not be 
the poorer, but the richer by every experience of 
effort and enjoyment we have had in our struggle 
to make the most of the world which God has made 
our home. The thought is familiar enough, at 
least on one side. Christian teaching has always 
taught men to look upon the discipline of life as 
the means by which they can learn what moral and 
spiritual values are eternal, and acquire such moral 
and spiritual characters as will outlast the world. 
It is, perhaps, a less familiar thought that the 
delights of the world are equally charged with 
revelations of spiritual value and equally potent for 

123 


124 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

our spiritual education, and are not more fraught 
with temptation and danger than is the discipline 
of work and sorrow. 

This brings the whole of the natural life, and no 
mere fraction of it, into the realm of religion. The 
religious life is the life that is responsive to the 
appeal of the spiritual in everything, in a sonnet as 
much as in a sermon, in a dance as well as in a duty. 
The Christian life is the life that perceives these 
spiritual values as Christ would perceive them and 
reacts toward them as He would. The Christian 
attitude toward the varied experiences of life is 
therefore not one of suspicion, though it is one of 
discrimination. Experience, grave or gay, is always 
presenting opportunities for choice ; but the choice 
is not between refusing the world’s gifts and accept¬ 
ing them. The choice is between accepting them 
sottishly and accepting them with a keen palate 
for their finest flavours ; between accepting them 
selfishly and accepting them socially; between 
accepting them for the passing satisfaction of the 
flesh, and accepting them as a sacrament of God’s 
goodness. All experiences are capable of being 
received with purely animal passion, or merely 
vegetable passivity ; but all are capable of being 
received with a quickening of the spirit which can 
see them as symbols of the speech of God to our 
spirits. The choice we have then to make, to be 
religious, and especially to be Christian, is not the 
choice of refraining from doing the things which 
the natural man desires to do, but of doing them 
with more refinement of perception, more pro¬ 
portion between one activity and another, more 


RELIGIOUS DECISION AND GROWTH 125 

care to promote the enjoyments of our fellows, and 
a more insatiable passion for the best. It is 
necessary to grasp firmly this fundamental quality 
of the religious life if we are to think clearly and 
truly of the stages of religious growth. 

The religious spirit is, then, the spirit wooed to 
self-forgetfulness by the experience of things really 
good, and inspired by their goodness to want to 
copy them and to share them. Inasmuch, then, as 
all perfection is summed up in God and revealed in 
Christ, the religious spirit, in its perfection, is just 
the love and worship of God in Christ. But this 
is the sum and total of it, its final flower. In its 
simplest essence it is just the disinterested desire 
for perfection, the recognition of something so 
absolutely worth while that one can forget oneself 
in the desire to enjoy it, to imitate it, to assimilate 
and re-embody it, to multiply it and pass it on. 
There is very little content in the religion of a man 
who can appreciate nothing but his religion. Who 
wants the praise of a man who can only praise one 
thing ? Who wants the adulation of the narrow¬ 
minded, inexperienced, starved and pinched souls 
who have, as it were, been nowhere and seen nothing 
in God’s universe ? Does God glory in such 
praise ? Surely the most religious spirit is the 
spirit which can find in the most of God’s works 
their own distinctive worth and goodness. It will 
not find less in the more complex and exacting of 
life’s experiences from having found more in those 
which are simple and elementary. 

There are, indeed, degrees of good, things higher 
and lower, things too juvenile for the grown man to 


126 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

linger over, successive choices to be made in which 
we turn aside from that, in order to make more sure 
of this. But we shall follow a false scent from the 
beginning if we fail to realise that in its simplest 
essence the religious spirit is one of sheer admiration 
for a good thing, and self-forgetfulness in seeking it. 
And that is why the religious spirit can be manifest 
in games and exercised by games just as it can be 
manifest in art and exercised by art. A good game 
is indeed a rudimentary form of art. It is an 
attempt to do something which has no permanent 
value except the value of the joy to which it gives 
rise. And the joy of a game is either the joy of 
seeing things so well done that we are carried out of 
ourselves with appreciation, or the joy of being 
carried out of ourselves in the attempt to do things 
well ourselves. It is a mixture of worship and self- 
forgetfulness, and dedication to perfection. Where 
there is this spirit (even in its most elementary form) 
there is, in boy or girl, a germ of the spirit life which 
is capable of untold expansion and development. 
Whereas, if this spirit be not present in its more 
elemental forms, the religious spirit, when it 
awakens later as a devotion to a moral ideal or in 
gratitude for the offer of eternal salvation, is apt 
to take in men and women a selfish, and even at 
times a sour, form. The more sources of admiration 
and springs of energetic action there are in any 
life, the richer will be its religious spirit when it 
matures. 


RELIGIOUS DECISION AND GROWTH 127 

II. The Growth of the Religious Spirit 

There is, of course, as we have said, a proper 
sequence of admirations and interests in an un¬ 
folding life, and life goes astray if it falls out of 
its proper course, whether precociously arriving too 
soon at what should be its more advanced adjust¬ 
ments of itself to the world, or childishly refusing 
to grow up. The progress of the spirit is twofold— 
ever deeper and finer in its appreciations, and ever 
wider and wider in its sympathies. Thus growth in 
religion is growth in appreciation of the common 
things in life, coupled with growth in desire to make 
their appreciation universal. Self-centred action 
and self-consciousness are more and more replaced 
by consciousness of the divine potentialities of 
life, and self-devotion to the work of making those 
potentialities universally realised. 

Yet another feature of our spiritual growth is 
the gradual concentration of our aims and interests 
towards a goal. The pursuit, by each individual, 
of those aims and interests for which he has some 
innate fitness, tends to make him, in the end, a 
person unlike any other in the particularity of his 
development. Out of the special ingredients of his 
life each one is capable of creating a unique person¬ 
ality, with unique value to his friends and to the 
world. There is in each of us a creative faculty 
like that which in the artist expresses itself in 
pictures. Each has a persistent striving toward 
some particular line of development along which he 
will find harmony and fulfilment. All personality 
aspires towards the unity and articulation of a work 


128 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

of art. In some this expression comes, as I have 
said, through the medium of the plastic arts ; 
in others, it will be through music, or through 
literature, through handicraft or through the 
education of children ; or it may be by a combina¬ 
tion of these, or along quite other lines. But none 
of us can reach his fulfilment except along lines 
particular to ourselves, each of us learning to live 
and labour truly for something we can appreciate. 

Now, this urge in each individual is the most 
significant part of him from the point of view of 
his education. It is this power to do something and 
desire to do it vigorously and well that is the centre 
of his life. Whatever direction it takes the wise 
educator follows it. Growth will come strongly 
and naturally only if this surging life force in the 
individual is encouraged to express itself freely 
and enjoyably. At the beginning, this gift for 
action or perception, this creative power in each 
individual will be exercised both blindly and 
selfishly, for we are all utterly self-centred beings 
in our cradles, and crude in the extreme for many a 
year. But every such gift is capable both of refine¬ 
ment and re-direction, and the moral and spiritual 
education of each separate being will be successful 
in proportion as it is able to refine and re-direct this 
innate power, giving it increasing insight into what 
is worth doing and worth feeling, and increasing 
devotion to the aim of spreading abroad whatever 
it can produce that others can enjoy. The problem 
of growth is thus the right transition from blind 
self-centred and purposeless living to disinterested 
devotion to the best. It involves a progressive 


RELIGIOUS DECISION AND GROWTH 129 

understanding of the deeper, more spiritual values 
in life, and a progressive transition from an external 
view to a spiritual view of all things. 

We have thus identified spiritual growth with 
growth in insight into the mysterious delightfulness, 
the all but inexpressible quality and charm which 
are to be found here, there, and everywhere in 
conduct and in the material world ; coupled with 
growth in the habitual self-forgetfulness which is 
natural to those who are obsessed with the wonder 
of life and the opportunities of sharing its wonder. 
And having done so we can now go on to claim that 
such a development is in the strict sense natural. 
We are built for it. That is what is meant by the 
saying that man is made in the image of God. The 
power to find and reproduce and distribute good 
things is natural to him. There may be another 
nature warring in him too, a natural tendency 
to evil; but it is not more natural than the tendency 
to good. Growth in religion thus comes naturally 
to those who are so happily circumstanced that the 
natural growth of goodness is not thwarted. They 
have no need to cultivate some strange sixth sense. 
They have but to respond successively to the 
invitations of the spirit to see and to follow the 
best things in the natural unfolding of their lives. 

Nature, in fact, is constantly urging life along 
a path of development which invites the unfolding 
of an ideal and unselfish life. In many features of 
our mental life this is evident. In the first place, 
Nature furnished us with that indefinable but all- 
powerful instinct which we call the instinct of the 
herd, which forbids us normally to be quite happy 

K 


1 3 o WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

when we are alone, thus driving us toward a sociable 
life. And then she has equipped us with a whole 
apparatus of mental powers which make it possible 
for us rapidly to enter into and acquire for ourselves 
the emotions, the ideas, the behaviour which we 
see embodied around us. Given, then, a social 
environment in which good models of action and 
feeling are manifest, and we have every chance of 
acquiring a right spirit and disposition. Moreover, 
adolescence brings with it a sudden power to 
appreciate big ideals of right and truth and beauty 
so that the transition from selfishness to altruism, and 
from spiritual blindness to spiritual vision is in the 
strict sense natural to every boy and girl when that 
great crisis of their physical growth steals over them. 

These facts are the commonplaces of the 
psychology of the social life. We are so constituted 
that although we are born with only the most 
primitive physical appetites, and with not the 
smallest concern with the happiness of any life but 
our own, life tends to build up in us, by rapid pro¬ 
cesses, a sense of our oneness with others, a desire 
to be at peace with them, a readiness to surrender 
the view or the claim which thwarts the common 
welfare and to cultivate the ways which accord 
with the ways of others. Our behaviour, our 
emotional reactions, our intellectual concepts, are 
all assimilated quickly and easily from our social 
environment, and if it be favourable we may quite 
rapidly acquire a character which is both unselfish 
and discriminating. The apparatus by which the 
entail of Christianity is passed on from life to life 
is nothing less than amazing. If, then, fine ideals 


RELIGIOUS DECISION AND GROWTH 131 

are visibly embodied for us in the social environ¬ 
ment of home, or school, or Church, if they are 
expressed in action and not paraded and pressed 
upon us in words, they have an astonishing power 
of communicating themselves by sheer contagion. 

This is not, of course, to assert that they are 
communicated inevitably. We do not forget that 
evil embodied in the social life around us has also 
and equally its contagious power. Nature is too 
easily content with arrests in the development of 
her types, with delay and frustration. A fatal 
inertia besets all natural organisms, with their 
limited stores of energy and knowledge. We tire 
and are content to let the partial good we have 
achieved become the enemy of further progress. 
The path to the ideal life is a stiff climb upwards. 
We must recognise the tendency of the unperfected 
life to stagnate, to despair of perfection, to stiffen 
itself against the claims of the ideal, to entrench 
itself selfishly and stubbornly in the halfway house 
to nobility and goodness which it has reached. 
The price of progress is eternal vigilance and un¬ 
wearying initiative. 

These facts are not denied, but they do not 
annul the point of the present argument that 
spiritual development is strictly natural. And if 
it be strictly natural, though not inevitable or easy, 
it cannot be isolated from development as a whole. 
The spirit does not grow best on any diet of beliefs 
and experiences unrelated to its ordinary interests 
and activities. On the contrary, the way of pro¬ 
gress in religion is the way of faithfulness to the 
claims and invitations of our ordinary life in the 


132 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

world. The growth of the spirit is not won in a 
single engagement, or in any purely inward combat 
in which good and evil confront each other in 
disembodied shapes; it is won in a thousand 
successive engagements in which man is invited to 
choose the finer and more social action, the braver 
and more adventurous career, the truer and more 
perfect satisfaction. Energy, decision, discrimina¬ 
tion—won anywhere will be available everywhere. 
It is the old story of the victory of Waterloo won 
on the playing fields of Eton. Fineness and 
strength of spirit are won by successive acts of 
choice and outputs of energy in every direction and 
equally in work and in play. 

III. The Fostering of Growth 

To secure the fitting spiritual development of 
any life, it is therefore necessary to assist it along 
the road of its highest natural development. That 
is best done by encouraging it to choose from time 
to time the occupations and aims into which it can 
throw itself with completest abandonment, because 
with completest sincerity, making sure that they 
are aims and occupations good in themselves and 
therefore calculated to lead the spirit onward and 
upward. There are such aims and pursuits, adapted 
to the experience and capacity of folk of every age 
and condition. From boyhood to manhood, from 
girlhood to womanhood, there are things to be done 
and things to be enjoyed exactly appropriate to the 
spirit’s development at each stage of its journey. 
The doing and enjoying of these things will confirm 


RELIGIOUS DECISION AND GROWTH 133 

the spirit in its hold on what is good and true, 
educate its powers of right and true appreciation, 
increase its capacity for further discovery, and its 
energy for good living. The problem of religious 
education is to find a true succession of such pursuits 
and enjoyments, adapted to the expanding capacity 
of growing lives. 

One of the discoveries of the last few years has 
been the proper spiritual expression of childhood. 
We have found, at least approximately, the forms 
of occupation into which boys and girls in their 
pre-adolescent days can throw themselves with 
complete zest, and the maximum of moral and 
spiritual profit. There is more than one variation 
of the prescription, but the type of activity is 
sufficiently covered by the one word “ scouting.” 
Scouting is very nearly the full and adequate 
expression of a small boy’s free energy. Through 
scouting he can bring into healthy and vigorous 
being whatever capacity there is in him for dis¬ 
covering the make of God’s world and establishing 
himself as a willing and useful member of it. If 
some great idea of God overarching His world 
overarches him too, he is, under skilful leadership, 
treading the upward spiritual path far more 
effectively than he would be doing it if he were 
spending his energies in cultivating spiritual states 
or forming brave resolutions. We are past the day 
when the ideal Christian child was thought to be 
one who was exercised beyond his years about the 
state of his soul, or the spiritual condition of his 
elders. We should count as painful and disastrous 
precocity some of the traits which our forefathers 


134 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

held up for admiration in the ideally pious child. 
Up to the age of adolescence, at least, we reckon 
that the child’s spirit should grow with as little 
as possible of self-consciousness and a maximum 
exhibition of juvenile spirits. 

When we come to the later period of childhood 
and the early period of youth, the same principles 
will hold true, though we have not yet been so 
successful in applying them. For boys we have 
team games to develop keenness, resource, and 
esprit de corps, and for girls the same opportunities 
are increasing. But we have not yet thought out 
the equivalent of scouting as a real expression of 
the part which youth might play, and might rejoice 
to play, in the service of the world as a whole. One 
might speculate a little on the form which such 
activities might take. There are boys and girls 
who have found themselves and have made good, 
simply through giving themselves to the assistance 
of younger children in their games. There are 
middle-class schools which have made the idea of 
universal brotherhood real to themselves by enter¬ 
taining boys of other schools in holiday fashion, 
or by building open-air swimming baths for the 
neighbouring villagers, and by other such acts of 
service appropriate to their own interests and 
powers. We have already risked a generalisation 
by suggesting* that youth might effectively learn 
brotherhood if it would set seriously about the work 
of providing good games and proper facilities for 
good games for everybody, and would pledge itself 
to initiate the backward and unfortunate into the 

# In Chapter IV. 


RELIGIOUS DECISION AND GROWTH 135 

playing of them. Or if this falls short of what is 
needed to capture the growing interests of the 
adolescent in the welfare of society, one might 
enlist youth in clubs and coteries for cleansing and 
beautifying the streets and squares of our 
neglected cities and villages, and their older 
members might pass on in due time to attempt 
the harder task of cleansing and beautifying the 
things that are done in their council chambers. 

All this, however, is speculation, set down more 
for the sake of illustration than as a definite pro¬ 
posal, and also for the sake of stimulating others to 
experiment. The point for insistence is that the 
dedication of spirit to be asked of early youth and 
later childhood should not be too abstract or difficult 
for youth’s understanding, and should not exact too 
sharp a discipline. Youth should not be too much 
preoccupied with the dark sides of life and the short¬ 
comings of others. Forms of activity should be 
suggested to youth through which the pleasure of 
helping others can be realised, and the desire to 
serve others directed along lines pleasurable in 
themselves. Discrimination between what is good 
and what is better should be trained through art 
and play, and all sense of opposition between games 
and recreation on the one hand and religion on the 
other should be absolutely broken down. It will 
be through the right choice of congenial recreations 
supporting and confirming its more abstract moral 
choices that youth will best achieve its spiritual 
development, learning to put life and energy into 
the things which minister to life and to set its face 
against those things which minister to evil. 


i 3 6 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

We may thus sum the matter up in two points. 
In the first place the activities which will minister 
to the spiritual development of youth must either 
be activities which youth itself approves or activities 
recommended by people whose judgment youth 
approves. It only leads to mental and spiritual 
regressions and the tangling of the lines of develop¬ 
ment if any personality commits itself in action to 
courses to which it is not committed in its own 
heart and in its own judgment; and it complicates 
the course of youth’s spiritual development end¬ 
lessly if the ideal of the spiritual life is associated 
with the negation of any activities which youth in 
its heart of hearts believes to be wholesome and 
good, or with the exalting of activities for which 
youth has no great use or aptitude. The dis¬ 
couragement of any form of innocent amusement 
is a case in point, and the identification of Christian 
service exclusively or even primarily with Sunday 
School Teaching is another. 

In the second place, in view of the limits of 
youth’s experience of life, the activities which are 
associated with the idea of Christian service should 
not be too exacting or ascetic. The point has been 
made already incidentally, but it should be made to 
stand out thus prominently by itself as a principle 
of first-rate importance. Youth does not know how 
strong are the forces of evil in the world and how 
much a point of honour therefore it is with a right- 
thinking man or woman to shoulder the burden of 
life and enter the lists in battle for the right. It is 
for manhood and womanhood to translate the 
dreams and games of youth into the stuff of the 


RELIGIOUS DECISION AND GROWTH 137 

Kingdom of God in the hard business of life. The 
business of youth is rather to fix its sense of values 
for itself than to make them operative for the 
world. And this it can do to a large extent by 
exercising itself in games which give value to what 
is excellent, honourable, and tasteful. If youth 
will but learn to appraise highly the things that are 
lovely in themselves, to hate whatever is cheap and 
shoddy, and to value goodwill above all things, 
manhood and womanhood will not go far astray. 
Decision rightly exercised in these ways will lead 
almost invariably to self-discipline and self-sacrifice 
in the end. 

The ethic for youth should not, then, be too 
hard or dour, unless the times are so essentially 
and unescapably harsh and dour that anything 
easier would seem like shirking, as it did in war 
time. But it is not always war time, and for the 
more normal years an ethic more naturally and 
obviously joyous is appropriate. Youth’s ethic 
should be neither narrowly utilitarian nor darkly 
puritanical. It will not go far astray if it has 
these two main principles as its foundations : viz., 
to do nothing that is not deeply worth while, and 
to keep to oneself nothing that is. Or we may put 
the same thing in other words and say that we 
should seek to share widely whatever we really 
value and find something to value greatly in what¬ 
ever we choose to do. There is a mine of morality 
in those two precepts. They express in terms of 
common use and plain meaning a good deal of man’s 
duty to love his neighbour and his God. For the 
love of God is based on the love of whatever is 


138 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

lovely in God’s world, and the love of man is the 
will to pass on to him whatever we ourselves have 
found to be good. 


IV. Religious Decision 

And now we have carried the argument far 
enough to bring out the essentials of a true religious 
decision. A religious decision should link the 
determination to follow a particular course of 
action with the conviction that to do so is absolutely 
right. It should, therefore, be a decision having 
quite clear and concrete meaning when it is made ; 
it should appeal to a person’s own conviction and 
experience as a thing really good in itself, and not 
only according to an arbitrary code of actions 
labelled religious ; the doing of it should be so 
desirable in the eyes of the doer that the determina¬ 
tion to do it releases new floods of energy ; and it 
should carry with it the sense that God wills man to 
do just such good deeds. A religious decision is thus 
a decision to do something in the direction in which 
life becomes fuller, richer, more deeply satisfying 
and stirring. We have already emphasised the 
necessity for youth that such decisions should be in 
line with the natural joy-seeking impulses and con¬ 
structive ambitions of all growing life, and should 
not be concerned with artificial interests and merely 
“ religious ” aims, that they should indeed be the 
choice of ways that are deeply felt to be worth while 
in work and play and comradeship. That also 
necessitates their being specific in meaning and not 
merely vague and abstract. 


RELIGIOUS DECISION AND GROWTH 139 

This necessity is all the greater if decision is 
invited under conditions when religious emotion is 
stirred, as it may be stirred, for example, in mass 
meetings. The more the emotional life is quickened 
on any such occasion, the more the need for securing 
that the decision should be worked out to some clear 
and wide-reaching change of practice, in home life, 
or the use of leisure, or the attitude to one’s work, 
or one’s dealings with one’s friends. The concrete 
expression of the decision in terms of ordinary 
secular life is needed to keep it practical and sane. 
Moreover, such practical and concrete decisions, 
require time for the person addressed to translate 
the appeal which has stirred him into the terms of 
his own life and see what actually it would involve 
in conduct—at any rate as a next step. That 
means that his thought needs to be quickened 
simultaneously with his emotional life, so that his 
critical faculties are brought to bear upon the 
question of what he is about to do, and his judgment 
is satisfied that it carries with it the assent of all 
that is best in him. For this reason experienced 
psychologists call attention to the danger of pre¬ 
cipitating decisions that do not represent the 
deliberate thought of the individual upon their 
specific content. If decision be recommended at 
a mass meeting, opportunity for such quiet re¬ 
flection needs to be provided, before the decision 
is consummated. 

To pursue the matter further would raise 
questions of evangelistic method outside our 
present scope. It is, however, necessary to say a 
little more about decision itself, and especially 


1 4 o WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

about the stages through which religious decision 
ought to pass to its consummation. Decision for 
God must be an ascending process of decision for 
the right and the true, the good and the beautiful— 
a process carried a step further every time some 
fresh aspect of right or truth or goodness, with its 
fresh demand for quality, comes home to us. The 
challenge to more comprehensive decision may come 
to us in special crises now and then when something 
happens to bring our life as a whole under review, 
and we can see more clearly if it is running off 
after unworthy aims. It may come tragically in 
moments of disillusionment to lives which have 
embraced wrong courses and pursued them till they 
have ended in degradation and disaster ; or it may 
come in the natural crisis of adolescence, when life 
has a way of presenting itself to consciousness as 
a whole, and the choices between right and wrong 
stand out more stark and clear than they are ever 
likely to do again. In all these cases, however, 
decision will be effectively Christian exactly in pro¬ 
portion as the thought of God and the name of 
Christ are linked with the thought of definite ways 
of ministering to the joy and wholesomeness of life. 

If Christ is thus identified with all the highest 
courses, the choice of any one of them may become 
the occasion for a life to dedicate itself to Him. 
The opportunity to ask for decisions for Christ 
may then be found as the natural climax of any 
of a hundred different appeals ; if only folk are 
taught that whenever they are fired with a passion 
for quality in things or in behaviour, their fire is fed 
by the flame of God Himself. God, the supreme 


RELIGIOUS DECISION AND GROWTH 141 

artist, the supreme craftsman, the supreme lover, 
is at the heart of all the creative joy and energy 
which well up in us and in our loves. So under¬ 
stood, life is full of invitations to decide for God, 
and the wise will be watchful to point them out 
at every turn. Each particular decision can be 
made a symbol of the total dedication of the life to 
God—true witness to our aspiration to be His 
entirely ; true witness also to His readiness to take 
whatever we are fit to offer, in token of the whole. 

Of all possible religious decisions, the one most 
nearly capable of expressing the full ideal of 
devotion to Christ is the act of joining His Church. 
The evangelistic appeal should therefore be most 
constantly associated with this particular choice. 
Nothing else can so well express the will to be always 
and in all things Christ’s disciples, ever learning 
more of our calling in Him. But, for this to be 
the case, the Church must be to its members not 
only a place of Christian worship and general 
Christian teaching, but a school of Christian work 
and Christian play—a place where Christian ideals 
of truth and beauty are embodied in definite forms 
of education and amusement, and where Christian 
ideals of life are translated from the general into 
the particular in intimate Christian conference. 
Such an ideal might entail a considerable enlarge¬ 
ment of the recreative activities of many churches 
and a criticism of the paltriness of others. It 
might require new forms of Christian education 
and Christian fellowship, uniting prayer with study 
and discussion of many practical social issues. 
But the expenditure of effort would not be too great 


142 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

if it succeeded in making clear to Christian people 
how their spiritual ideals should inter-penetrate 
their work and play. The world needs individual 
witnesses to the meaning of Christianity quite as 
much as it needs public missions, but the average 
Christian is at present tongue-tied as a witness 
because he does not clearly understand the relation 
between the special inward experiences of the Spirit 
which are fostered in public worship and the com¬ 
mon outward activities of daily life; and no 
amount of exhortation to evangelise his neighbours 
will make him anything but a nuisance and a 
hypocrite until he does. 

At the present time, however, the appeal to 
join the Church as an act of Christian decision is 
hindered because the conception of life commonly 
connected with Church membership is something 
rather unwholesomely introspective and selfishly 
aloof from the greater human causes, if not even 
darkly antagonistic to the natural joy of life itself. 
Wrong though such a view may be, it is not wholly 
unaccountable ; and whilst it holds, extraordinary 
measures are required. If those outside the Churches 
knew more of the sweet charities and wholesome 
goodness which grow up in the protection of the 
creed and worship which to them seem so forbidding, 
they might be more ready to throw in their lot with 
the Churches as they are—with all their disconcert¬ 
ing faults and puzzling features. But seeing they 
are ignorant of these things, the Churches must 
sometimes humble themselves and ask newcomers 
to join the fellowship, not of the Church itself, 
but of some more limited and welcoming group 


RELIGIOUS DECISION AND GROWTH 143 

of kindred souls within it, or in free association 
with it. 

And now one thing alone remains to be said. 
Throughout this book the emphasis has been laid 
upon the naturalness of the Christian life and the 
way in which its inner growth should march with 
its unfolding interests and powers. There is, 
however, another side to the matter, not, indeed, 
overlooked so far, but needing in these closing 
paragraphs to stand out in the clearest light. The 
experience of God is more than the experience of 
goodness or of beauty, or of growth in the apprecia¬ 
tion of these. The name of Christ is no mere 
symbol for perfection. The crown of Christianity 
is the personal relation of the Christian person to 
the Christian God, and it is reached through 
intimate personal communion with Jesus Christ 
It is an experience that cannot be consummated 
until our natures have been stirred and searched 
by Christ to their lowest deeps. And in that 
searching and stirring we are bound to undergo 
the deep humiliation of self-knowledge and to be 
called to the utter abandonment of self, with all 
its false perspectives and mistaken aims. Thus, 
the things which are the commonplaces of religious 
teaching—repentance, faith, and self-surrender— 
are still the things that matter most. But these 
things will both mean more in themselves and seem 
in better harmony with whatever else we know of 
life’s true values precisely in proportion to the 
thoroughness with which we have taken up the 
whole of our natural life into the scope of our 
Christian experience and purpose. 


i 4 4 WORK, PLAY, AND THE GOSPEL 

So the upshot of this book is not in any way 
to discredit the evangelist’s aim of bringing indi¬ 
viduals to a personal experience of God through 
Jesus Christ; it is rather to show that there are a 
thousand avenues by which the beginnings of that 
personal experience may be acquired. Nor does 
it in the least belittle the Church’s constant effort, 
by its worship and instruction, its sacraments and 
sermons, to arouse us to the reality of God’s Personal 
Being and the demands He makes upon us as a 
whole ; it is rather to discriminate against a Gospel 
which sets God in opposition to life. The choice is 
not between life and God ; it is between life ever 
waning and dwindling because antagonistic to its 
own ideal, and life ever waxing and expanding 
because yielded to the control of its true Master, 
Christ Himself. So far as this spreads out a broader 
view of God’s dealings with us than that generally 
held, it makes the problem of educating the human 
spirit in the Christian way a bigger problem, and 
relates it more closely with human education as a 
whole. To that wider question of spiritual training 
we may perhaps return in another book; but 
whether then or now the point of importance is 
not where Christian experience begins in the life 
of nature, but where it ends in the heart of God. 
From first to last there is no break in the ascending 
path; but everywhere life bears witness to the 
love of our Father—Holy and Eternal—and calls 
upon us to rise up and live as His whole-hearted, 
joyous sons and daughters. 


















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